OpenStack Issues
The Open-stack Foundation is warning those purporting to be Open-stack service providers that they'd better be interoperable. Otherwise, they might be in a bit of trouble. If you have cheap domain web hosting with Rack-space and it's Open-stack-powered, you might want to pay attention.
The Lowdown
An interoperability working group was “re-fired up” at the last Open Stack board meeting in an effort to assure cheap domain web hosting providers offering Open Stack cloud hosting pass the Open Stack test to avoid fragmentation problems.
McKenty says providers have some time to comply: “Don't expect teeth in that policy until Havana,” the next version of OpenStack.
What Makes A Service Open Stack?
Right now, in order for a cheap domain web hosting provider to offer an Open Stack cloud service, Nova and Swift must be implemented. These are the compute and storage functionalities of Open Stack. However, implementing these two functions don't totally ensure interoperability — there are no directives in place that require service providers to implement specific APIs.
McKenty is heading up a new project at OpenStack in order to improve the interoperability issue. Although the OpenStack community is supportive of the project, there has been no official vote as of yet to make it official.
What Is The New Project?
It's called Refstack, currently in development, a reference implementation of OpenStack that providers can use as a benchmark. OpenStack also plans to develop automated testing allowing providers to test the services they offer against Refstack, resulting in a compliance scorecard.
While everyone is waiting for the development of Refstack, a large number of OpenStack cloud services that are technically following the current interoperability guidelines aren't exactly easily interoperable.
“The question of interoperability is a tricky one to draw a line on,” said McKenty. If standards are low, a user could create a virtual machine and find out what the IP address is, and “every public OpenStack cloud is interoperable in that sense,” he said. If you then attempt to use third party tools like CloudEnvy, built for use with OpenStack, you might find they don't work unless you use libraries developed specifically addressing the differences in the service. The OpenStack Foundation wants to negate the need for libraries used to make OpenStack and related services play nice together.
“The reason I'm so concerned with interoperability, and this may be more of my personal passion than a rational view of the ecosystem, is I don't believe we'll have just a handful of OpenStack clouds,” said McKenty. His vision is tens of thousands of OpenStack clouds, meaning an interoperability solution is critically necessary.
OpenStack Issues: How HP And Rackspace Responded
If you rely on Rackspace to provide your cheap domain web hosting, you'll be happy to hear they plan to be completely interoperable by the end of 2013. Troy Toman, the director of cloud compute engineering for the company said in a blog post, “While we believe some variation in implementations will be inevitable, we do want to eliminate as many of these as possible to provide as much of a common OpenStack experience as we can.”
HP, on the other hand, isn't as forthcoming. They deny that they are not interoperable, saying to IT World, “HP Cloud Services adheres to OpenStack's interoperability guidelines. We are committed to OpenStack and are compatible with OpenStack APIs. In addition, we have a policy of not introducing proprietary API extensions. HP is supporting core OpenStack APIs and we have not added our own proprietary API extensions, therefore this ensures our interoperability with other OpenStack deployments.”
A company representative said the company feels it is important to “add some level of your own innovation to create products that” are distinguished from other OpenStack clouds. This representative, vice president of product marketing and cloud evangelist for HP Cloud Services Margaret Dawson, assures that HP has remained true to the APIs and code base to allow integration with other parts of the stack.
Do you rely on OpenStack cloud services from your cheap domain web hosting provider? Does this issue concern you?