OpenStack ready for primetime

01 Aug 2012

IP EXPO Online speaks to Rackspace

OpenStack is ready for primetime. Back in April, hosting company Rackspace announced that it was set to launch the first commercial cloud service to be powered by the open source cloud operating system it founded two years ago with US space agency NASA.

That time has come: on 1 August, Rackspace launched the first and largest OpenStack-based public cloud in the US; on 15 August, it will do the same in the UK, for its European customers.

“We founded OpenStack, so it would be a little bit embarrassing if we weren’t first out of the blocks with this,” jokes Nigel Beighton, international vice president of technology at Rackspace.

The implications of this move, however, are serious and profound: the implementation of OpenStack on this scale opens up huge possibilities in terms of cloud portability.

“For many significant cloud users that want to use multiple clouds to power their infrastructure, and don’t want to put all their eggs in one basket, this is huge,” says Beighton. “Much as I’d like to seem them all use Rackspace, and never use anyone else, the reality is that companies don’t want to take a risk on just one player. What they do want is a standard API that allows them to use the same tools and the same knowledge to rebuild their applications from one cloud to another, preferably in a matter of minutes, and not be locked in.

“What’s generating an awful lot of interest out there is this whole idea of computing as a utility like electricity and, because the plug’s the same, companies can play with more than one [cloud].”

The project to create an entirely new infrastructure for Rackspace was not without hurdles, however: “When you’ve built something using your own technology, the advantage you have is that you control everything. The challenges that we’ve had in doing this is that it is based on open source technology – the design of various components of it are not controlled by us. If the OpenStack community wish to take the technology in a different direction, we have to go with them, because we’re in this lock, stock and barrel.”

The fact that the new infrastructure underpins such a fundamentally core part of Rackspace’s business ratcheted up the pressure still further but Beighton insists the company has a huge amount of faith in the OpenStack community, which now numbers 168 companies. “There’s a lot of clever people in the OpenStack community who know more in certain areas than we do – people from Cisco, Nicera, NTT, HP and Rightscale, for example. They’ve all put a lot of effort and thought into this and Rackspace alone would never be able to match the intellectual power of 168 companies working together.”

What now lies ahead for Rackspace is dealing with the practicalities of moving 79,000 servers on its legacy infrastructure onto the new OpenStack infrastructure. Around 1,000 customers have ‘early access’ to the new platform, says Beighton, and these will move “fairly seamlessly” across. One of the advantages of the new platform is its performance: Rackspace can spin up 20 times more servers in a given period than it could with its legacy platform. Those customers with more sophisticated applications hosted by Rackspace will take “three, six or even nine months” to move across, but Beighton insists “they’ll get as much time and as much help as they need.” All new customers, meanwhile, will get access to the new environment as soon as they sign up.

But this development is far bigger than Rackspace itself, as it takes open source technology to a whole new, “industrial-scale” level, says Beighton. “I think we’re very close now to people building whole data centres out of nothing but open source. We’re not quite there yet, but we’re very, very close.”