# Canonical switches to OpenStack for Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud



## overmind (May 14, 2011)

"Canonical announced the open source OpenStack cloud platform will be the core technology in its Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud package [...]"

The news is here:
http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/Canonical-picks-OpenStack/

More about OpenStack here:
http://www.openstack.org/

There's a tendency nowadays to promote cloud computing, of course backed (or even promoted) by big companies. Google for example try to make people feel is easy to store everything in the cloud and get the OS from the cloud (that's what they want to achieve).

I was curious what is really a cloud for them, because it sound so appealing but in fact some of those are just a simple storage solution accessible from web interface or other clients.

So, I wanted to know what technology uses Amazon for their cloud. It appear to be Linux + Xen. The only trick is that if a virtual machine is not available automatically using a Xen feature (live migration) the virtual machine that is not more available is migrated to another physical machine almost in real time and then it appears as is the cloud. But in fact there are virtual machines on top of multi-core/CPU physical CPUs.

When I fist heard of the cloud not as "the Internet" but as clusters of computers I thought is some sort of combination between HPC and storage and HA, but in that case all services offered - like for example a http server - would be rewritten to support parallel 
compute which is not the case. So there's nothing fancy but a bunch of computers, some file system shared with a well known technology and then a manager that batches jobs and assign computers to execute them.

Red Hat and Ubuntu have such feature as "Cloud Computing", which I don't REALLY know what it means but I wonder if we'll have something like OpenStack in FreeBSD. Anyway I think such setup can be achieved with jails + carp.

Do you guys have experience with "Cloud Computing" as in RHEL/Ubuntu "Enterprise Cloud package". What it is really? Storage? HPC? HA?

The funny part is when your boss call you and tell you to make a company cloud, and the boss of course does not know what he really wants (but he want a cloud because he read in a IT magazine about "clouds".


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## gkontos (May 14, 2011)

Cloud computing, fancy word right ?

It sounds much more high tech than it actually can be. Although promising technology it can not fully develop under todays old and insecure IPv4.


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## bbzz (May 14, 2011)

IPv6 is not necessarily more secure than IPv4.
And the _only_ reason we are switching to IPv6 is space, that's it.


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## gkontos (May 14, 2011)

bbzz said:
			
		

> IPv6 is not necessarily more secure than IPv4.
> And the _only_ reason we are switching to IPv6 is space, that's it.


You are very wrong but this is getting off topic so I will not elaborate.

Cheers


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## bbzz (May 14, 2011)

I am curious to hear you side however.
It is very common misconception that IPv6 will somehow solve our security problems.
It all comes down to implementation.
We've been running IPv4 for 30 years now. We always found new extensions to make it reliable. We would not switch if there weren't for space limitation of IPv4. Regards


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## overmind (May 15, 2011)

*offtopic*



			
				gkontos said:
			
		

> You are very wrong but this is getting off topic so I will not elaborate.
> 
> Cheers



It's funny that your post is off-topic to topic that is under off-topic topic section of the forum. 

Oh no a special case .

Anyway I'm curious too.


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## tingo (May 15, 2011)

Then why don't you start a new topic and ask about it?


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## gkontos (May 16, 2011)

TCP/IP was never designed to be a secure medium for communications. Its layered design though, soon made it the standard protocol for Internet communications leaving out another popular protocol,  X25. It might sound hard to believe but X25 is still being used today in the banking sector.

The main problem of today's IPv4 is the lack of security. Network attacks most often take advantage of this, attacking the core tcp/ip stack. That is the main reason why network firewalls do more than simple packet filtering.

Data encryption was never designed to be a part of IPv6. Encryption techniques like IPSEC are added later with a main disadvantage. They always work in a host to host scenario. That means they can not be used widely.

IPv6 is not a superset of IPv4 but an entirely new suite of protocols. Built-in security, although IPSec is also available for IPv4 implementations, it is not mandated but optional.

Support for IPSec in IPv6 implementations is not an option but a *requirement*.


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## bbzz (May 16, 2011)

This is true (most of it), but also irrelevant.
Things like new header design, IPSEC integration, ND instead of ARP, and a myriad of other improvements do very little to overall security of network. Most attacks done on IPv4 are available in same or modified form as before. Some are gone due to new design, some new will appear.


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## numpad5 (Sep 11, 2012)

I will quickly agree with bbzz, now on to the original topic.

My understanding is that some of the cloud software is written in cross platform interpreted languages like python, so that much porting isn't necessary, so FreeBSD may already have something similar to run a cloud.

The difference between cloud and regular cluster or grid is simply the way it is used as far as I know.

Regular hpc or storage cluster is sort of a private access thing that you have to maintain yourself.

Cloud is just a fancy word they use to make it sound cool so they can manage and sell it to the public.

So in otherwords, cloud is kind of a remote shared or public cluster that you simply access from anywhere on the internet, whereas a normal cluster doesn't have to be accessed that way.

Cloud is just subtype of cluster.  Like saying some cats are gray, but not all cats are gray.


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## kevla (Sep 11, 2012)

NASA and Rackspace started the idea and spun it out to the public sector. From there the guys at NASA's Ames Research Labs open sourced the code base. They then started a company called Nebula to build a smart switch / appliance to control a network compute infrastructure. From there numerous companies from HP, Dell, OpsCode, Canonical and many more all have joined in to work on the code base.

The idea behind openstack is to have a "open standard"  for what company's like Amazon have created with their Amazon Web Service's  EC2, S3, etc. product line. Currently the openstack project is focused on 3 areas which are compute, block storage and networking. The core openstack application is written in Python and  the code is available on their website.

Can it run on FreeBSD, I can't honestly tell you right now as I recently just to started testing FreeBSD out for our server needs. But given that Python runs on FreeBSD. It surely must be possible since openstack can run on Ubuntu and now RHEL. Openstack is looking for contributors and all are welcomed to join in at any level. Google openstack and a wealth of information and sources will come up. That is about all I know, hopefully it gets you pointed in the right direction to learn more about what openstack is about.

-Kevin


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