Hybrid Cloud In 2018…
Enterprise disruption as a direct consequence of IT capabilities has been a constant theme on this blog. Advances in Cloud, Big Data and AI capabilities by the FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google/Alphabet) companies are taking a huge chunk out of millennial market share from incumbent enterprises. It is high time that the Fortune 5000 begin to shed legacy approaches, technology stacks, and mindsets.
OpenStack in 2018 has the maturity, innovation & feature capability help established companies transition to the brave new world of Hybrid cloud. For a project that has been much pilloried for being unnecessarily complex, let us consider the six capabilities OpenStack can now provide to serve as the foundation of your hybrid cloud.
OpenStack Evolves…
The OpenStack project which began life as a technology platform has come of age over the last two years. It has made advances in several categories that denote maturity – scalability, improved management & an operator experience and vendor support. It has found a high degree of adoption in the telco space around virtualizing network functions (NFV) and is slowly making its way into the enterprise as the gold standard for private cloud. Among the chief uses of OpenStack is to serve as the internal standard for IaaS clouds. In that sense, it enables enterprises to build a cost-effective alternative to the three major public clouds- AWS, Azure & GCP.
In 2018, the OpenStack market was expected to be worth 3.46 billion USD growing at about 25% annually. [1]
The top five drivers that are compelling enterprises to adopt a private cloud strategy are as follows –
- Digital Acceleration – The original intention of OpenStack project was to build a platform that could serve as a foundation for cloud-native workloads. This trend largely coincides with the movement in the Fortune 5000 to adopting technologies that enable the highest degree of responsiveness – mobility, micro level customer analytics and Artificial Intelligence. All of these trends need the highest degree of agility in how applications are built, updated and refined. OpenStack is a critical capability in achieving this degree of IaaS responsiveness.
- DevOps – When one combines the above trend with a need to move away from a monolithic three-tier architecture to microservices and serverless computing, DevOps becomes a reality. OpenStack working with a Kubernetes has enables the ability to enable the setup of large-scale CI/CD pipelines that are predicated on a bulletproof lifecycle. This is for both VMs and Container based development. This includes everything from Image builds, deployments and scales up/scale down semantics that supports reduced error rates.
- Software Defined Infrastructure – Virtually every application built for the cloud incorporates microservices. Microservices confer a degree of agility on the part of the application while abstracting resiliency away from infrastructure. Cloud Native ways of developing applications become the defacto standard. These applications need to be architected, designed, developed, packaged, delivered and managed based on a deep understanding of the frameworks of cloud computing. The application itself is designed for scalability, resiliency, and incremental enhance-ability from the get-go. Such a trend has been termed Software Defined Infrastructure with supporting tenets include IaaS deployment & management; and Container Orchestration. SDI that not only will this change how your infrastructure is provisioned & deployed but also how it is managed. OpenStack is the primary way of building SDI based datacenters in a private cloud.
- Cost Reduction – While enterprises still run lots of proprietary virtualization, OpenStack offers a compelling alternative in its ability to virtualize not just compute but also storage and network. as well. For organizations in the second stage of Cloud Maturity, server virtualization is heavily deployed across the board. While terms such as IaaS, Containers, Orchestration, SaaS etc are things being actively discussed across development, infrastructure and operations teams – the predominant model is running vendor-supplied software to manage large fleets of virtual instances – often hundreds of thousands. Most of the infrastructure is run is internally hosted with two and more datacenters spread across a country or spanning one/two continents. However, there is growing interest in lines of business using public cloud due to their dissatisfaction with central IT providing them servers with long lead times (typically between 1 and 2 months). While the total application estate numbers in the hundreds, enterprises in this stage have begun setting down central IT architecture standards to reduce application sprawl. While silos are being broken down in IT, there is a bid to rationalize data & application assets, purchasing decisions are shared between lines of business and the IT group. OpenStack leverages hypervisors for computing but differs from traditional virtualization in several key ways that define modern cloud platforms. Virtualization of not only compute but also storage and networking to create a fully software-defined infrastructure (SDI). OpenStack in conjunction with other open source tools can ensure the full automation of the provisioning/management lifecycle. Thus business processes are not slowed down by manual intervention.
- Enable Line of Business Self Service – Every service within OpenStack can be accessed and invoked via an API. Which then creates the ability to provide self-service as a total. Control of and access to all infrastructure and services through easily accessible APIs, which creates the concept of programmable infrastructure or infrastructure as code. With projects such as OpenStack Omni, OpenStack can serve as the single pane of glass that federates access to any underlying virtualization (VMWare, KVM) and cloud provider (OpenStack, AWS, Azure, GCP et al). Self-service portals can easily be created that allow users to individually provision and manage their own resources, which are isolated from the resources of other users
Summary
Adopted and implemented optimally, OpenStack can serve as the foundation to run microservices and serves applications that host a range of applications – web apps, Big Data, ML & AI etc. Further, the open model of OpenStack development ensures that technology advances are factored into the platform with every release. That insulates an enterprise from the high rate of digital acceleration. Over the next decade, enterprise IT applications such as ERP, BORT systems and CRM etc will be refactored and gravitating to leverage OpenStack as the IaaS foundation.
References
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/498552/openstack-market-size