OpenStack Cloud Sees Explosive Growth

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: One bit of accepted wisdom in some cloud circles is that OpenStack, the open-source Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud, is declining. Nothing could be further from the truth. It's alive, well, and growing like crazy. According to the 2022 OpenStack User Survey, OpenStack now has over 40 million production cores. Or, in other words, it's seen 60% growth since 2021 and a 166% jump since 2020. Not bad for a so-called also-run, eh? It's not just telecoms, where OpenStack has become the backbone of major cell companies such as China Mobile and Verizon. Nor is it just other major companies such as the Japanese instant messaging service LINE, the on-demand, cloud-based financial management service company Workday, Walmart Labs, and Yahoo. No, many other, much smaller companies have also staked their cloud future on OpenStack.

Why? There are many reasons. As Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the Open Infrastructure Foundation (OpenInfra Foundation), OpenStack's parent organization, said, "OpenStack supports the ever-changing world of infrastructure where now we have GPUs, FPGAs, smart NICs, and smart storage. At the same time, you can still get direct access to the underlying hardware." This, in turn, enables "OpenStack users to create such amazing things as telecom cloud workloads on the cloud that can do edge transcoding video. With this, people can watch 4K videos on their phones using 5G." Another reason for OpenStack's growing popularity is its Kubernetes integration. Thanks to Linux OpenStack Kubernetes Infrastructure (LOKI), Kubernetes is now deployed on over 85% of OpenStack deployments. In addition, Magnum, the OpenStack container orchestration service, is also gaining popularity. 21% of users are now running production workloads with it. [...] Kubernetes is also very useful with hybrid clouds. OpenStack is often used in hybrid clouds. Indeed, 80% of OpenStack users are deploying it in hybrid clouds. To make it easier to build out hybrid clouds, operators are turning to Octavia, an open-source, operator-scale load-balancing program. Today, not quite 50% of OpenStack deployments are using Octavia. OpenInfra Foundation's general manager Thierry Carrez said: "Hype is nice, but substance lasts, and as OpenStack deployments continue to grow in staggering numbers, the OpenStack community is proving that it's not only alive and well, but also delivering indisputable value to organizations."

How much smaller companies?

[RemindMeLater]

Just look at the number of components in Open Stack... https://www.openstack.org/soft... [openstack.org] Each service presumably with its own config files, quirks, upgrade issues, etc. No way is a sysadmin or two climbing that learning curve if they can avoid it.

Re:

[Anonymice]

Considering the cost of a comparably large ESX installation, with all of the the extra licenced features that you could achieve with OpenStack, employing a qualified team dedicated to running it becomes a very viable option.

It's one of the things we frequently complain about with corporatism, where "manager types" prefer to spend large amounts of money on providers so they can outsource responsibility/blame, instead of simply investing the money in quality engineers who can hold their shit together.

Re:

[polgair]

It's not that bad. The fundamental openstack apis are web services talking to unix userland. It is conceptually very simple. The more advanced services are web services that tied into openstack via openstack's own orchestration interface(s), i.e. webservices calling webservices. Much of the open source products underneath openstack runs on rabbitmq, apache, python, mysql/galera, memcache, haproxy and kvm, You do block storage through iscsi, ceph or whatever storage provider you want to employ, you do

Re:

[polgair]

There is nothing theoretical about this. I've deployed OpenStack in production from 2012 to 2020. I've installed the whole thing by hand when I first had to learn it. I did the folsom to grizzly to havana to icehouse upgrade by hand. I've also stood up multiple clusters across multiple data centers in a matter of a few weeks. Ceph, IMHO, is a much harder beast to tame than Openstack when things go awry.

Much of keystone is pretty basic if you leave the things to defaults and only have to auth against ac

Re:

[coofercat]

Indeed - and there are "cloud providers" who use it under the covers and can barely run it properly, despite it being the very reason for their existence.

I haven't used OpenStack as an admin, but have given Proxmox a whirl. The latter is pretty simple, and (I think) is going for a VMware type experience. OpenStack seems like Kubernetes is to Docker compared.

If nothing else, these products do show just how good the big cloud providers really are. They somehow manage to knit all of this stuff together in a si

Re:

[polgair]

I think the weirdness of their names is confusing as well, but openstack has unified their userland interface to 'openstackutils' rather than having to contend with glance/newtron/cinder/etc etc's specific tools a few years back.

The incentive to openstack vs rolling everything on vms using proxmox is fundamentally some of the automation sugar that you can add on. A lot of the same basic stuff you can automate through aws, like security rules, networking, routing, firewall related stuff, can be orchestrated

Medium sized companies at least

[realxmp]

At Sanger [sanger.ac.uk] we do it with about 2.5-3.5 FTE of experienced sysadmins + StackHPC [stackhpc.com] as consultants. Yes you do need to understand how it's put together, but once you do it's manageable but you aren't going to do this as a small company with a tiny microcloud. To make it worthwhile you need at least a few racks of compute under it and ideally be providing compute to a diverse range of groups. You also need to be disciplined and have it set up so that you can deploy it all from ansible and be prepared to go through

Re:

[LostMyBeaver]

We're doing great with four or five people. We have ten on a much smaller VMware infrastructure. And we have a much more stable OpenStack. We need VMware for VDI. But we'll phase out VMware in five years we hope.
We're looking at Harvester now which looks VERY promising

Garbage.

[ToasterMonkey]

IaC, IaaS, k8s, containers, and all the damned tooling in between is hot steaming garbage. It is a giant masturbatory software "engineering" circle jerk.

Automate internal software deployments literally any other way you can and run away as fast as possible from all this web developer who knows some python does infrastructure bush league garbage.

Linux as a development platform does suck, hear me out, and this development stack is not the answer. I don't mean I have some beef with vi, I mean it really sucks

Notoriously Cheap customers and Clients

[Canberra1]

Phone companies and Walmart - they want the job done cheap, and this works. They are a bit larger, so they work out the config issues. Other companies can port out slowly. Hybrid cloud is an interesting term, as all clouds were supposed to be interchangeable. A cloudtastropie coming to a workstation near you

Re:

[GPLHost-Thomas]

OpenStack immature? Man, this was in 2014... We're in 2022. OpenStack is 11 years old, and it runs very well.

Also, adding the word "crap" in all sentences doesn't buy you anything, and make me think you're the immature :(.

For someone that operates it, it's probably correct that it's hard to tackle. I wouldn't leave someone in charge without at least one year of experience using it. However, for someone using OpenStack, it's an administrator dream becoming reality. Servers are popped up in a matter of se

Is this pasted from a brochure? Got paid, right?

[sabbede]

Is Slashdot being paid to run ads as articles? Should we be giving BeauHD a hard time for posting ads as news, or for neglecting to be paid for it?

As much as I don't like the idea of "sponsored content", I like the idea of running ads-masquerading-as-news for free even less.

Interesting Timing

[cbass377]

Broadcom acquired VMware, Openstack suddenly starts growing.