Hi Jay,
thanks for your comments. I really appreciate your sincere words. I've asked many people about this and got no answer so far. This is the first answer I get from the Openstack Community. Many of the people I talk to say they haven't even been tried Cloudstack and I think it is a shame. Thanks for your time. Jordi. A 2014-12-08 22:52, Jay Pipes escrigué: > Hi Jordi, thank you SO much for this email. It is excellent feedback for > our community and our developers. I've provided some comments inline, > but overall just wanted to thank you for bringing some of these product > needs to our attention. > > On 12/03/2014 01:42 PM, Jordi Moles Blanco wrote: > >> Hi everyone, I've been looking though the old messages in this list and I >> haven't found this kind of information (sorry if it is present somewhere and >> I couldn't find), so I decided to ask you because you are the experts on >> this. We want to build a new cloud platform and we have been playing with >> both options for a while. There are plenty of articles where people give >> their opinion about which stack technology is better, but they are more >> business-oriented than technically-oriented. > > Agreed. And, to be fair, we try not to promote the idea that there is > always a one-size-fits-all solution for everybody's needs. > > Both OpenStack and Cloudstack are solutions that work well for certain > customers -- anybody who says one is a good solution and the other isn't > is being dishonest or shallow. > >> I don't want to do that, I don't think there are good or bad players in this >> game, just different options that you have to know very well before you make >> your decision. > > ++ > >> And that's why I'm asking you as Openstack experts. You see, I managed to >> deploy a Cloustack 4.4.1 platform with 2 compute nodes (for live-migration >> testing) in less than 2 hours, while it took me days to deploy an Openstack >> infrastructure that was functional and sometimes it just breaks and I have >> to reboot some nodes or redeploy with Fuel. > > This is an extremely common complaint about OpenStack. That it is just > too difficult to install and configure a simple OpenStack environment > with common compute, block storage, and networking functionality. > > I could sit here and say that this problem is due to the fact that > OpenStack's community has embraced each and every configuration > management system, deployment architecture, and package management > platform and therefore the complexity you find is simply due to the > dizzying array of options and flexibility offered by the ecosystem. > > But, of course, that would be a complete cop-out and terrible excuse. > The fact is, our installation and deployment story is currently overly > complicated, inconsistently documented, and difficult for newcomers to > get their heads around. That needs to be fixed. > >> I know, I'm just an inexperienced Openstack user, but that is one of my >> points: For any company that wants to go all the way to Openstack, it may >> inevitably face a big transformation and I don't think that everyone is >> ready for that. Sure, you do that because you want to change, you want to be >> able to provide infrastructure much faster, but there are other options that >> don't mean such a big change. > > Agreed. > > <snip> > >> What I do care about is having a platform that eases the process of vm >> provisioning and at the same time is easy to install, configure and >> maintain. Both platforms do that, but I feel that in order to do that, you >> need to have a group of highly trained people in Openstack whose only job is >> keeping the infrastructure running, while due to Cloudstack architecture, It >> doesn't seem like you need the same kind of expertise. > > Yes, completely agreed. It's something we need to do much better at. > >> If you don't want to dedicate resources, you can always pay for a managed >> Openstack solution, but then you are outsourcing your platform and, again, >> not everyone is ready for that, both for culture and pricing. I've also read >> several times that Openstack is a more mature project, with more features >> than other projects. Here are some thoughts: -As for vm provisioning, they >> both do that. -Cloudstack also has something similar to Ceilometer. >> -Cloudstack network management is also able to provide Network As a service: >> vpn, lb, etc. -Support for several commercial hypervisors on both. >> -Orchestration tools on top of the stack. It is true that Openstack comes >> with things like Heat, Juju or Openshift, but you can also use Juju with >> instances from Cloudtack and there are things like Cloudstack integration in >> Vagrant. > > To be clear, the only thing directly related to OpenStack is Heat. > > Juju is a tool from Canonical that can be used to install/deploy > applications in various VMs. OpenShift is a platform from Red Hat that > provides an application container system for developers to deploy their > applications into a cloud infrastructure. > > There is OpenStack "integration" with Vagrant via various things like > devstack-vagrant: > > https://github.com/openstack-dev/devstack-vagrant [1] > >> -Both can integrate well with Amazon. -Things like deploying Hadoop with a >> click from Horizon is great, but it is virtualized and not suitable for all >> needs. Also, you can deploy Hadoop with Juju on Cloudstack vms. Obviously, I >> know pretty well what we will do with the Cloud infraestructure: vm >> provisioning that will allow us to sell services to end users. We won't sell >> vms to the end-user, only services: web, dns, mysql, etc. We will also >> probably go for containers, but you don't need Openstack for that, tools >> like Kubernetes let you play with Docker at scale in a very easy way. > > True enough. OpenStack Nova/Glance/Cinder/Ironic/Neutron is about the > infrastructure underneath those containers, though, not the containers > themselves. You still need a system to provision the bare metal and/or > VM resources in which the containers will be hosted. > >> So... given all that and the complexity of running Openstack, I just want to >> know, feature-wise, why you think Openstack is a better option. For example, >> I can think of scalability. Openstack has the storage system built-in with >> Swift and Ceph. > > Note that Ceph != OpenStack. Ceph is great, but it's entirely separate > from OpenStack. It's true that Glance, Cinder, and Nova contain various > drivers that support RBD/Ceph, but the Ceph project is not in OpenStack > itself. > >> Ceph is great and very scalable, while Cloudstack only asks you to add an >> external storage system (mainly NAS or SAN). So, in Cloudstack, you have to >> prepare and scale if necessary an independent storage system or create a new >> zone with a new pool. I wonder how much you can actually scale Ceph and if >> you don't have to make a new deployment of Openstack when you reach a >> certain number of Ceph nodes or computes nodes (specially because >> performance declines after a certain number of Ceph nodes). > > Not sure. I'll let the Ceph experts handle that question... > >> We are right now testing both projects and their features seem equally >> advanced for what we want to do (I would even say that Cloudstack has some >> cool features like the ability to limit how many IOPS an instance can use. > > Note that OpenStack also has the ability to limit IOPS that an instance > can use, however, like many things in OpenStack, this feature is not > particularly well documented and is awkward to configure: > > https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/InstanceResourceQuota#IO_limits [2] > >> Can you highlight some Openstack advantages that we may be missing in our >> tests? > > There are few technical differences between the features offered by > Cloudstack and OpenStack. OpenStack generally supports more driver > options and topology options than Cloudstack, with the cost of increased > complexity. > > The primary differences between Cloudstack and OpenStack are the > non-technical differences that you said you were less interested in: the > size and breadth of the community providing support, the focus on GUI > configuration versus command-line + GUI interfaces, etc. > > All the best, > -jay > > _______________________________________________ > Mailing list: http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack > [3] > Post to : openstack@lists.openstack.org > Unsubscribe : http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack > [3] Links: ------ [1] https://github.com/openstack-dev/devstack-vagrant [2] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/InstanceResourceQuota#IO_limits [3] http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack
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