The reality of information technology today is that most enterprises want to mix and match platforms from multiple different vendors, a reality that has driven the OpenStack open source cloud computing platform to make interoperability a key goal.

At the OpenStack Summit in Barcelona Wednesday, 18 members of the platform announced that they’ve achieved just that, demonstrating the ability to run OpenStack deployments across on-premises, public and hybrid clouds.

One of the key deployment issues that has dogged OpenStack since the platform was first released in 2010 was the ability to migrate workloads across various different cloud providers. “Some doubted whether the vendors supporting OpenStack would work together to achieve interoperability,” Don Rippert, general manager of IBM Cloud, said in a statement.

IBM Corp. was responsible for bringing together the various vendors to demonstrate how interoperability among different distributions could be achieved. Last April, it called for the community to work together to make it possible when it created the “Interop Challenge,” an initiative aimed at showing how OpenStack can deliver on the promise of interoperability across vendors. Rippert, who announced the initiative, challenged the community to do so by October 2016.

Rising to the challenge

Along with IBM, other vendors participating in the challenge included Canonical Ltd., Cisco Systems Inc., Mirantis Inc., Rackspace Inc., Red Hat Inc. and VMware Inc. During the demonstration Wednesday, the companies said their interoperability initiative focused on “workload portability.”

Specifically, IBM tasked the companies with setting up and running a complete enterprise stack, with the target being a three-tiered enterprise application  using the LAMP Stack, a collection of basic web services software. This was composed of a WordPress application running off MySQL with a load balancer. Each company used the Ansible DevOps tool and the OpenStack Shade component to deploy the project, and each also used the RefStack application programming interface. Each company was running on an OpenStack cloud as well.

To prove interoperability can be done, each vendor employed its own architecture and programs. Canonical, for example, used Ubuntu 16.04, while IBM went with Ubuntu 14.04. Red Hat naturally went with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and several others used CentOS. The vendors all used different hardware architectures too – for example, Linaro demonstrated how to run a stack on ARM-64 architecture.

“What customers want from open source projects is innovation, integration and interoperability,” IBM’s Rippert said. “Today with this significant milestone, we are proving to the world that cross-vendor OpenStack interoperability is a reality. When it comes to OpenStack, our hope is that this demonstration of working interoperability will reduce customer fears of vendor lock-in.”

Back in 2010 when Rackspace cofounded the project with NASA, Rackspace’s then-President Lew Moorman said one of the central aims was to prevent vendor lock-in as companies moved to the cloud. The demonstration offers proof that those who use open-source programs and DevOps with OpenStack can indeed migrate their workloads from one cloud to another,

Image credit: Masayuki Igawa; Flickr