OpenStack Training

OpenStack is an open-source cloud-computing software platform. It was started as a joint venture between Rackspace Hosting and NASA, then spun-off as a separate non-profit venture that is backed by a variety of sponsoring companies. Many big name companies and organizations use OpenStack as their cloud provider, including HubSpot, PayPal, Ticketfly, Wikimedia, CERN, and the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab. Open Stack is supported by giants like IBM, Intel, Red Hat, and HP. It has thousands of contributors and is developed in Python.

Companies use OpenStack as an alternative to having to create/maintain their own physical private servers. Companies prefer open source solutions like OpenStack because open source innovates faster and doesn’t lock companies into a proprietary solution. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is generally seen as the competitor to OpenStack. AWS is meant for elasticity and flexibility, not throughput and scale. AWS is ultimately designed for operations like online retail, photo sharing, and file storage/management. This works for certain use cases but less so when you start talking about Big Data coming from industries like genomics, proteomics, climate modeling, finance, geology, cosmology, oceanography, and the growing “Internet of Things”. Others have pointed out that OpenStack is competing much more with companies/orgs like CloudStack, Eucalyptus, OpenNebula, and OnApp than with Azure or AWS directly.

OpenStack has different code names for its components and services. Its compute engine is called Nova. The image service is called Glance. The object storage is called Swift (not to be confused with the programming language). OpenStack performs its product releases on a 6-month release cycle.