Why Google’s embrace of the OpenStack consortium matters..

Google just announced a few days ago [1] that they are joining the OpenStack foundation as a sponsor member – which got me massively excited. This is both a glowing endorsement and a shot in the arm to he rapidly maturing OpenStack – the umbrella IaaS project – something I’ve always thought of as the defacto private cloud platform (http://www.vamsitalkstech.com/?s=Openstack) and one that is beginning to see massive adoption in the enterprise. This follows Google’s move, in 2014, to open source it’s container management project – Kubernetes with contributions from Red Hat, Microsoft among others.

So lets parse what this means for CTOs, CIOs and other IT leaders considering OpenStack or even general cloud technology from both a strategic and technical direction –

1. Google is the third largest public cloud provider behind Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. This makes OpenStack definitely all the more viable (if it was not already before) as a technology to predicate your private cloud on. Expect to see more hybrid cloud capabilities in OpenStack going forward
2. Docker and container based technology are on the march to becoming the defacto way of building and operating applications at scale. If you are designing agile applications that intend to serve business needs – you definitely need to consider Docker, Kubenetes, Mesos etc
3. The killer app for Cloud are the applications. Thus, I hold that every new business project now needs to be cloud enabled from the get go and old ones reconfigured as appropiate. As you make this imminent move, consider Platform As A Service (PaaS) providers like OpenShift – which largely abstract away the complexity of using such new age technology (Docker & Kubernetes) and also provide out of the box integration with best of breed tools like Jenkins, Git and Maven etc
4. We are not too far off from a future where applications developed on a PaaS run seamlessly on top of an OpenStack managed cloud with enterprise integration with everything from compute, network, storage, front-office (service catalogs and self service portals) & back-office systems (billing & chargeback)
5. The first prong of webscale is Data. Expect to find full stack Hadoop clusters running in container based architectures in a year or two. Hortonworks has already begun the work of being able to provision and manage Hadoop across multiple providers, with it’s acquisition and integration of SequenceIO
6. Google runs the world’s largest container workloads in their datacenters. They launch about 2 billion containers a week[1] and virtually every service at Google runs in a container – Gmail, Search etc. This kind of significant webscale expertise will only enrich OpenStack over time & lead to architectures that are multitenant at massive scale and are higher density than is currently possible with VMs. Are VMs going away anytime soon? No, but it will be a mixed world full of exciting technology choices for developers to make
7. Application workloads that are certified on OpenStack can be designed to leverage the benefits of leveraging patterns of microservice based development & deployment that underpin kubernetes. Customers develop (docker) container based applications and let Kubernetes handle the placement and workload management
8. I blogged about a month or so ago about OpenStack use cases and the fact that OpenStack could potentially be used as primarily a container based workload provisioning technology. With this move by Google, we are closer than ever to organizations running container based clouds. Expect to see organizations building out full scale vertical clouds that are only container based and OpenStack controlled
9. The Kubernetes framework will be certified to work on OpenStack. Kubernetes can manage container deployments as a whole, which makes it a huge win for anyone running real world applications that can span multiple containera and complex datacenter deployments. OpenStack’s nascent container project – Magnum uses APIs to provision and manage containers. These containers are running on instances provisioned by Nova (VM or baremetal). Magnum already leverages Kubernetes for orchestration & supports Docker as the core container technology. The building blocks are all there to build exciting digital applications that are highly automated from a sys admins perspective & engaging from a customer perspective
10. With this move, everyone that is someone in tech is a member of the OpenStack consortium. The last two holdouts being Amazon and Microsoft. And that is not a ding against these two behemoths.Amazon is an amazingly innovative business and constantly morphs from one avatar to the next. Microsoft has not only managed to stay relevant but is also leading the move to the public cloud with a panoply of exciting offerings. All said and done, enterprise IT now has some amazing choices to architect workloads that their business leaders and stakeholders demand.

Given this upsurge in the community and as the OpenStack train leaves the station, lock-in should not be a top concern on any enterprise IT practitioner’s mind.

References –

1. OpenStack blog

http://www.openstack.org/blog/2015/07/google-bringing-container-expertise-to-openstack/

2. Fortune article

http://fortune.com/2015/07/16/google-joins-openstack/