The New Linux | Hacker News Reader

The New Linux

theregister.co.uk

28 pointslmoorman4 comments

For those who read the whole article and like me still couldn't really tell what it was, openstack.org seems to describe it as a vm provisioning and management API along with a middleware component for long term archival disk storage with replication. So for creating, starting, stopping and such of vms through a vendor independent abstraction, and something that might be a bit like s3 without a back end.

A bit of a stretch to call it the new linux.

OpenStack is designed to be a collection of projects that together can be used as the basis of a scalable cloud deployment (public or private). Currently, there are two big projects in OpenStack: nova and swift.

Nova can be compared to EC2. It is designed to provision compute instances, and it's goals are to support a million physical hosts with many times that for VMs running on the hosts. It is currently under active development and used in production at NASA.

Swift is a scalable object storage system similar to S3. It's designed to support 100+ petabyte clusters each with 100000 requests per second, tens of thousands of hard drives on thousands of storage nodes. It is currently running in production at Rackspace as Cloud Files.

Unlike AWS or Eucalyptus, OpenStack is 100% open--both source and development.

The claim of "the new Linux" comes from the thought that Linux was an open OS that changed the way servers ran. OpenStack's goal is to be the OS for the data center. It's a layer above the individual machines and ties together the IaaS pieces needed for a DC.

Disclosure: I work for Rackspace and am a developer for swift.

OpenStack guys are pretty awesome. We've had some of those guys come by at the Cloudkick office. I have big hopes for this project. :)

What's amazing is how the article just assumes that "open source" is seen by big enterprises as a reason to trust it. 10 years ago (the year Windows XP was released), that would not have been the case.

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