Canonical Intros Microcloud: Simple, Free, On-prem Linux Clustering (theregister.com) 16
Canonical hosted an amusingly failure-filled demo of its new easy-to-install, Ubuntu-powered tool for building small-to-medium scale, on-premises high-availability clusters, Microcloud, at an event in London yesterday. From a report: The intro to the talk leaned heavily on Canonical's looming 20th anniversary, and with good reason. Ubuntu has carved out a substantial slice of the Linux market for itself on the basis of being easier to use than most of its rivals, at no cost -- something that many Linux players still seem not to fully comprehend. The presentation was as buzzword-heavy as one might expect, and it's also extensively based on Canonical's in-house tech, such as the LXD containervisor, Snap packaging, and, optionally, the Ubuntu Core snap-based immutable distro. (The only missing buzzword didn't crop up until the Q&A session, and we were pleased by its absence: it's not built on and doesn't use Kubernetes, but you can run Kubernetes on it if you wish.)
We're certain this is going to turn off or alienate a lot of the more fundamentalist Penguinistas, but we are equally sure that Canonical won't care. In the immortal words of Kevin Smith, it's not for critics. Microcloud combines several existing bits of off-the-shelf FOSS tech in order to make it easy to link from three to 50 Ubuntu machines into an in-house, private high-availability cluster, with live migration and automatic failover. It uses its own LXD containervisor to manage nodes and workloads, Ceph for distributed storage, OpenZFS for local storage, and OVN to virtualize the cluster interconnect. All the tools are packaged as snaps. It supports both x86-64 and Arm64 nodes, including Raspberry Pi kit, and clusters can mix both architectures. The event included several demonstrations using an on-stage cluster of three ODROID machines with "Intel N6005" processors, so we reckon they were ODROID H3+ units -- which we suspect the company chose because of their dual Ethernet connections.
We're certain this is going to turn off or alienate a lot of the more fundamentalist Penguinistas, but we are equally sure that Canonical won't care. In the immortal words of Kevin Smith, it's not for critics. Microcloud combines several existing bits of off-the-shelf FOSS tech in order to make it easy to link from three to 50 Ubuntu machines into an in-house, private high-availability cluster, with live migration and automatic failover. It uses its own LXD containervisor to manage nodes and workloads, Ceph for distributed storage, OpenZFS for local storage, and OVN to virtualize the cluster interconnect. All the tools are packaged as snaps. It supports both x86-64 and Arm64 nodes, including Raspberry Pi kit, and clusters can mix both architectures. The event included several demonstrations using an on-stage cluster of three ODROID machines with "Intel N6005" processors, so we reckon they were ODROID H3+ units -- which we suspect the company chose because of their dual Ethernet connections.
Cant be much worse than Piranha / RHCS (Score:2)
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It's not like they already have a self-hosted cloud management [maas.io] platform, or bundled anyone else's [ubuntu.com], amirite?
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Third time's the charm?
OpenStack was first, and at this point the big vendors all would rather their customers forget about it already. Last time I went to an OpenStack summit, it was very lightly attended, and probably 70% of the people were vendors basically trying to talk OpenStack users to migrate off to... well anything else.
maas hasn't really gotten traction. I know a few folks that tried it and shrugged it off as not really doing anything for them.
I see too much "not invented here" to have much con
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The problem with OpenStack is that it was completely free... but the man-hours to make a working overcloud and undercloud was tremendous. If Keystone hiccuped in the slightest, the entire thing came crashing down. Because of all the relatively complex moving parts, businesses just shrugged it off, and either went to AWS, or they kept with VMWare.
Red Hat fell into this trap as well, going from oVirt/RHEV to OpenShift. Yes, Kubernetes is awesome, but a lot of companies still use pet machines and a traditio
Re:Cant be much worse than Piranha / RHCS (Score:4)
I like how they've focused on storage out of the gate. k8s was designed to manage stateless, ephemeral containers and doesn't directly provide any storage solution. Also, live migration has great value; many important things will never be rewritten as "cloud" apps that can be scheduled willy-nilly in a cluster. But they also must keep running as the cluster evolves.
Canonical appears to be targeting smaller orgs that have a mix of applications, including stateful, legacy stuff that is nign-on impossible to coerce into the popular cluster stacks. I think there is a lot of room for something like this.
Cloudy with a Chance of Failover (Score:2)
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Surely they had practiced setting it up from scratch prior to presenting it...right...?
Liam Proven can't write well (Score:2)
Wondering why we're seeing tech journalists like this who write as if they're trying out to play Daria in a movie, or if they've watched too much Buffy.
What does this do ? (Score:2)
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It looks like it supports docker. Proxmox goes the LXC route. (Yes I know you can run an OS as a VM and install docker there but not as convient.)
That said, I prefer LXC so this doesn't bother me much. Just took a while to change my flow from docker to LXC.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of (Score:1)
...tiny clusters.
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i-understood-that-reference.gif
no because snap (Score:2)
If it weren't for snap then maybe.
But with snap, no way.
Ubuntu keeps trying to make themselves a standard... By ignoring existing standards.
That is not what Unix/Unixlike customers want.
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That's what was interesting to me. Every time Ubuntu gets a choice between enhancing a popular existing solution and making something up, they always go for making something up, at least a first pass. It'd be one thing if they had a track record of "holy cow, this is so much better", but generally it's at best "almost as good" as the popular alternative they are trying to displace, frequently as bad as "why did they even think to bother with how much worse it is?"
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I can't help of thinking of all those ressources wasted in making a duplicate software, that could have been put to better use. Like upgrading the current one.