Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Foreword:

Notes on Choosing a Cloud Provider – There are currently many Big players in the market:

  • AWS is the clear Dominator
  • Google Cloud
  • Microsoft Azure
  • Open Stack
  • Cloud Foundry etc.

In my experience, AWS seems to be a popular choice. This trend would probably continue for the coming years as they continue to improve their existing services and also introduce new services(for example, AWS IoT). At this point in the market, enough people in the industry already know about AWS – their service offerings and their API’s etc.

Google, with the GCE project, is an interesting player in the market. Google’s Services are being delivered SaaS way from a long time. One of the glaring difference when it comes to GCE is the fact that the cloud traffic flows through Google’s private distributed internet,unlike AWS whose traffic flows in the public internet. Google doesn’t have a elaborate list of services like AWS, but, they are very competitive in pricing and promise better performance. For examples, Google does Load Balancing/ Auto scaling right off the shelf, you would not need to create a ELB, worry about pre-warming it, Auto-scaling rules etc. Some cool things.

While many new Start-ups, Small/ Mid-size companies are embracing the Public Cloud, there are many traditional Big Enterprise companies that have their own data-centers etc that are embracing Public Clouds for their new software projects, they are also taking a Hybrid Approach where-in their additional Infra resides in the cloud and is seamlessly integrated with their existing Infra behind their Data centers.

OpenStack and Cloud Foundry seem to be the clear fore-runners in the Hybrid Cloud Space. Their Services not just help Enterprises transform their existing Infra into a Private Cloud, but, also help them supplement additional Infra in the Public Clouds.

While AWS is currently supporting Hybrid Customer Implementations in different ways, for example –

  • AWS Storage Gateway
  • VPC Peering, allowing setup of Customer Gateways and VPG(Virtual Private Gateways) for connecting your data-center resources to that on AWS cloud.
  • Setting up a bastion host on-premise with technologies like OpenVPN, OpenSwan etc
  • Active Directory Domain Controllers running in the cloud that become part of the AD on-premise.
  • AWS Directory Services etc.

One glaring lack is a unified solution with greater and deeper integration to all the private resources inside the data center, for example, OpenStack services (Nova) can be used for provisioning and management of servers using Foreman.

Foreman’s core is tightly integrated with Puppet, while providing a unified dashboard for all the compute resources available inside the data center, Foreman relies on Puppet for their configuration/ monitoring. Foreman also uses PackStack for configuration of nodes.

Not to mention that AWS is also following suit and taking steps in this direction, the recent announcement of its deeper vcenter integration is an example.

Open Stack Platform at High Level consists of:

  1. RHEV (Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization) – Important projects include KVM, libvirt etc. Many small companies with small private data centers who want to do away with VMWare licenses still adopt and use these technologies.

The trade-off here would be the fact that there are High IT Hardware Budgets, More     Effort and Time goes into Capacity Planning, Infra/ Inventory Management and           Provisioning/ Availabity of new Infra takes time.

2. Satellite for Software Lifecycle Management

3. Red Hat Open Stack Platform

Of course, there are other important and popular projects like JBoss/Wildfly etc.

A little while ago, I have a HBR article that discussed the concept of Holistic Learning, i.e, Learning/Remembering new things by associating things them to things you already know. I thought this blog post could serve as interesting place to anyone who wants to know about Open Stack Platform if they already know AWS Platform like me.

Red Hat OpenStack Platform Services as they relate to some other service offered by AWS:

Horizon -> AWS Console

Nova -> EC2

Nuetron -> Collective equivalent of VPC, Route 53, Security Groups, ACL’s etc that AWS supports.

Elastic IP’s/ Private IP’s -> Public/Floating IP’s

Nuetron Load Balancer as Services (Not so popular among customers yet. .. ) -> ELB (Elastic Load Balancer)

Cloud Forms -> Cloud Formation, Ops Works etc

Cielometer -> Cloud Watch

Heat -> Auto Scaling

Key Stone -> AWS IAM

Swift -> S3

Cinder (LVM based Storage Service) -> EBS

Glance (Images are considered to be nothing but bootable partitions) -> AMI

Open Stack Projects currently being Incubated:

Sahara -> EMR (Elastic Map Reduce)

Trove -> RDS (Relational DB Service)

Marconi -> SQA (Simple Queue Service)

Designate -> Route 53 (DNS Service)

Barbican -> AWS Key Management Service

Ironic -> Not Applicable to AWS as AWS doesn’t have Services that allow bare-metal provisioning. The closest you can get is requesting for tenancy at time of provisioning and Placement Groups

More details on OpenStack Platform and the Architecture of its components here.