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Piston Cloud Launches OpenStack Distro

Maria Deutscher — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 18:47:57 +0000

Piston Cloud has rolled out Piston Enterprise OS, or pentOS, into general availability today. The cloud platform is a refined, commercial version of OpenStack – the open-source cloud OS initiative originally kicked off by Rackspace and NASA.

PentOS offers a number of advantages to enterprises with private cloud deployments; first and foremost the fact that it’s open. The OS’s agnostic nature enables companies to integrate it with third party offerings, including public OpenStack-powered clouds such as those operated by Rackspace, Dell and other providers. In addition, it can be deployed on just about any piece legacy hardware or multi-vendor environment.

PentOS is running on a Linux distribution specifically developed by Piston for this purpose, which adds another layer of security, according to the company. And the cloud OS is making use of Null-Tier Architecture, yet another piece of Piston Cloud-developed technology.

The patented code combines storage, compute and networking in every node, making it easier to scale deployments and simplifying the product even further. Piston claims that PentOS can be installed within just 10 minutes.

“As we continue to see security lag in the public cloud environment, it is clear that private cloud is really the only option for organizations dealing with large volumes of regulated data,” said Joshua McKenty, CEO and co-founder of Piston Cloud. “To date, VMware was the only widely accepted option for private cloud, which brought with it associated cost, complexity and vendor lock-in. Piston Enterprise OS disrupts the market with the easiest, most secure and open approach to private cloud.”

We first learned about Piston Cloud’s commercial distribution of OpenStack in September. Our own Kristen Nicole covered the details, noting the background developments on this up and coming company.

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In the same vein:

Rackspace Open Sources Dreadnot, a DevOps Deployment Tool Written in Node.js

Klint Finley — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 21:45:11 +0000

Today Rackspace announced that it is open sourcing Dreadnot, a tool for automating and monitoring deployments with support for multiple regions. The project, which was heavily influenced by Etsy’s Deployinator, was built in Node.js and is used in production at Rackspace by the Cloud Monitoring team

The goal of Dreadnot is to enable “continuous deployment.” Rackspace engineer Paul Querna writes:

Rather than deploying less frequently with more manual testing, we deploy more frequently, relying upon a culture of test-driven development, code review and extensive quality assurance automation to catch bugs early and minimize service interruptions. Our maxim is that a new engineer should be able to push code into production on their first day on the job.

This idea of continuous deployment is central to agile development and DevOps. It enables teams to more quickly introduce new features, fix bugs faster and reduce the divergence and complexity of managing separate release and development branches. However, there remains a need to maintain reliability in mission critical apps.

Rackspace does this by heavily automating the deployment process and by using cross-region redundancy. Automation reduces the chances that mistakes are made, and uses different regions allows the team to deploy code to one availability region and verify that it works, without affecting other regions. Dreadnot enables the Rackspace team to do accomplish this more easily.

Dreadnot includes integrations with Git, Buildbot, Apache HTTPD and Chef Integrations.

Dreadnot was built with Node.js, the Express framework, Socket.IO and Bootstrap. Along with Deployinator, it’s a great example of how Node.js is being used in production for enterprise-grade applications.

NodeSummit, coming up January 24-25, will take a further look at how Node.js can and is being used by businesses. We’ll be covering the event live on theCube. Tune in then.

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In the same vein:

OpenLogic PaaS Now Deploys on Rackspace Cloud

Maria Deutscher — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 14:03:19 +0000

OpenLogic said today that its open-source PaaS offering can now be deployed by Rackspace Cloud users. CloudSwing is also becoming available via the Rackspace Cloud Tools catalog.

CloudSwing’s big attraction is that users can fully customize the various technology stacks while leveraging OpenLogic’s support for over 600 open source packs, as well as the platform’s cost monitoring capabilities.

Existing OpenLogic customers will now be able to run their apps on Rackspace Cloud, while the latter’s subscribers will be able to use CloudSwing in order to customize and monitor their existing deployments.

“The Rackspace Cloud and CloudSwing are both built to handle the highly-flexible and on-demand environments that enterprises need to deploy in the cloud,” said Ven Shanmugam, Senior Manager, Strategy and Corporate Development at Rackspace. “We welcome OpenLogic into our Cloud Tools community.”

The partnership with Rackspace is the second recent time OpenLogic expanded its PaaS’s support roster. Earlier this month we’ve learned that the company has teamed up with New Relic. The SaaS firm provides application performance monitoring on the browser and infrastructure sides, thus easily supplementing the cost management tools already included with CloudSwing.

The whole concept has earned OpenLogic’s offering a lot of early demand. It launched in October and has managed to triple the number of users in just 60 months, according to official data.

While OpenLogic fleshes out its PaaS, Rackspace is doing the same with OpenStack. The open-source cloud OS will be spun off to become the foundation of its own initiative in 2012, but Rackspace is, and will likely remain, heavily invested in the project it helped to get off the ground. The company released Rackspace Cloud: Private Edition, a cloud service aimed at organizations operating medium to large private cloud deployments. The core offering, which is the Diablo release of OpenStack, is completely free.

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In the same vein:

Infographic: The Most Popular Tools and Services Among Developers

Klint Finley — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 18:39:16 +0000

BestVendor recently polled 500 developers around the world to ask them what tools they use, from IDEs to project management to frameworks to databases. It sheds light on trends in cloud storage, hosting and NoSQL adoption. Check it out below.

Click here for larger version.

A few things standout:

MongoDB is the only NoSQL database to place, and it’s just as popular as PostgresSQL in this poll. I doubt that MongoDB is more common in production, but it’s significant how much traction this DB has gotten.
Dropbox absolutely crushes all other cloud storage providers.
Amazon Web Services has a significant lead over Rackspace (especially if you factor in Heroku, which runs on AWS), but it’s far from a monopolist.

The trending apps section is important as well. I’ve been covering Node.js for a while now. Both the initial over-enthusiasm and over-skepticism is starting to die down, allowing the platform to come into its own. If you want to get filled in on what’s going on in the Node.js world, theCube will be at NodeSummit next month.

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In the same vein:

Rackspace Launches OpenStack Private Cloud

Alex Williams — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 20:02:30 +0000

Rackspace is making its first steps toward a support-centric model with its new OpenStack based private cloud.

The new service is built on a Rackspace developed reference architecture that uses OpenStack “Diablo” software release as its project code. Its next update will come in April with the OpenStack Essex release.

Rackspace Cloud: Private Edition is intended for medium-to-large scale private clouds. Rackspace provides the reference architecture, which is free and fully open. Organizations may use the reference architecture with or without Rackspace support.

Rackspace is also working with a group of service providers to provide integration and associated support. Dell is an active partner in the project through the use of its Crowbar software, which was recently open sourced.

OenStack Diablo is considered production ready but it is still quite complex for most people. That’s understandable considering that these are early days for enterprise ready, multi-tenant infrastructures. Add to that the newness of OpenStack and the challenge magnifies.

That’s in part why Rackpace General Manager Jim Currie said they are looking for people with DevOps experience. People who have experience in this emerging technology discipline share both operations and developer talents. They are par admin, part operations and part developers – rolled into one. “We are not just a hosting company,” Currie said.

Rackspace will provide “how to” documentation for the service and a certification program.

Services Angle

There’s a lot of pressure on OpenStack right now to deliver on the hope and promise of a truly open cloud standard. This project will test those waters, as well as setup Rackspace outside of its hosting world and give it more of that lucrative services revenue that so many companies are now seeking.

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In the same vein:

Brits Hoard over $3.7BN in Digital Assets, Most Don’t Know of the Cloud

Isha Suri — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 19:00:27 +0000

A recent study by Rackspace- Generation Cloud reveals that the use of Cloud for the storage of digital assets and possessions is increasing more than ever. This study was conducted by Rackspace in association with the centre for Creative and Social Technology (CAST) at Goldsmiths, University of London. The study was conducted among 2,000 UK adults, and reveals that the dependence on cloud computing is rapidly increasing in UK, either in a knowing or unknowingly manner. Out of all these respondents, 66 percent replied with a positive response when asked about cloud computing usage. Interestingly, many of them do not even realize that they are using these cloud services.

Some key findings from the study are as following:

As a group, Brits are hoarding at least £2.3bn worth of personal possessions in the cloud (Almost a quarter (24 per cent) of UK adults estimate they have £200 or more worth of music, videos, photos in their personal cloud).

31 per cent of Brits say they have considered digital possessions as a potential ‘digital inheritance’ that they could leave behind when they die.

11 per cent have addressed their digital entities with care – e.g. they have left passwords to their digital treasures in their will – or are at least planning to do so.

Over half (53 per cent) have what they consider ‘treasured possessions’ in cloud services such as Hotmail, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr.

Two-thirds (66 per cent) of us have our head in the clouds – we are unaware we regularly use the cloud (even though 1 in 10 spend more than 5 hours a day in it – more than 76 days in total over a year).

Take a look at this infographic for detailed figures:

Brits Hoard over $3.7BN in Digital Assets, Most Don’t Know of the Cloud is a post from: SiliconANGLE
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In the same vein:

Piston Cloud Brings First OpenStack Solution: Ready for Prime Time?

Kristen Nicole — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 07:03:42 +0000

OpenStack has been around for over a year now, racking up some pretty high profile partners especially in the past few months. And as the ecosystem continues to mature, we begin to see some product launches around RackSpace’s open source initiative. Piston Cloud is officially launching today, introducing pentOS for the enterprise. It’s an open cloud operating system for managing enterprise private cloud environments, looking to offer the best of both worlds to its users.

The brainchild of co-founder and CEO Joshua McKenty, Piston is a cherished project with a deep-seated understanding of the OpenStack platform. McKenty is a former RackSpacer, and was also the technical lead and cloud architect of NASA’s Nebula Cloud Computing Platform, upon which the OpenStack project was built. Along with other Rackspace alum including Christopher MacGown (Piston co-founder and CTO), the Piston team is well-versed in open source cloud technology, but more specifically the OpenStack platform.

Growing a worldwide community with over 1,450 contributors and over 100 participating companies, OpenStack is certainly a supported initiative that’s recognized for its velocity. And with that comes a demand to see the proof in the pudding, with Piston emerging as an early OpenStack product out to demonstrate it’s ready for prime time. Piston’s got a head start in this regard, and is in a good position to become a leader in this sector. It’s first product is pentOS.

Piston Enterprise OSTM (pentOS) is the first enterprise OpenStack cloud operating system focused on security and private cloud operations. Using Piston’s patent-pending Mull-Tier Architecture, clients receive storage, compute and networking on every node for massive scalability. It’s custom built to address regulatory requirements and other concerns many enterprises have with cloud solutions. Enabling companies to better manage big data, pentOS is the first enterprise implementation of CloudAudit, a cross-industry standard that came out in 2010 to automate auditing cloud processes.

The Null-Tier Architecture is really the point of interest with pentOS, addressing the complexity of hardware while optimizing on the software side, through automation for integration to maintain security as well. It aims to get rid of the middle tier all together, taking advantage of the cloud without this new breed of systems operations. It gives pentOS a nice little bundle called the Cloud Key, a USB stick that configures everything for you once you plug it into the stack. “We call it the insider attack,” McKenty says. “Most security breaches come from folks that work inside of the company. The fewer that have administrative credentials on hardware, the more secure it is. That’s just a starting point.”

Piston Cloud has a lot it’s looking to do moving forward, helping to bring OpenStack solutions to the enterprise while addressing their security concerns as well. In doing so, Piston marks an effort to validate the OpenStack platform, which is just now building a market around its initial offering.

“There are so many people involved in [OpenStack] that any individual perspective is going to be wrong,” McKenty says. “And I still have no grasp of what’s happening–OpenStack is unbelievably global…the timing is so serendipitous. It’s the right thing at the right time, pointing in the right direction. This will be one of those things like the Internet. No one knows who invented it.”

Piston Cloud Brings First OpenStack Solution: Ready for Prime Time? is a post from: SiliconANGLE
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In the same vein:

OpenStack Training Woos Developers as Open Cloud Gains Traction

Maria Deutscher — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 18:09:45 +0000

Cloud host Rackspace will start offering training courses for OpenStack, delivered by the Rackspace Cloud Builders, the company’s core development team responsible for the NASA Nebula Cloud Platform and the Rackspace Cloud.

OpenStack is an open-source cloud OS initiative Rackspace kick started with NASA a little over a year ago, and since gained an ecosystem of dozens of partners.

The initial five-day training course titled Fundamentals Training for OpenStack will be offered before the OpenStack Design Summit in Boston, the Rackspace campus in London and at the Dell campus in Austin. The company said additional locations will be added.

Here’s some details about what attendees can expect:

“Two days of the fundamentals course will focus on OpenStack Object Storage, open source software that can create petabytes of distributed, reliable storage, and three days will focus on OpenStack Compute, open source software used to provision and manage large networks of virtual machines.”

Rackspace is working on further fleshing out OpenStack’s potential, and these training courses are one way of extending that to companies, whether customers or partners. The latest to join an existing list of over 100 partners is NEC, a Japanese networking company. OpenStack was also one of the biggest topics back at Oscon 2011 last month, when Gluster announced its first contribution to the project, a piece of code that integrates GlusterFS with OpenStack to free up VMs and data within a deployment.

Cloudera, the biggest distributor of open-source big data management platform Hadoop, made a similar move earlier this month – the company announced the Cloudera Connect Partner Program. It includes a certification suite for Apache Hadoop, the first of its kind, and a Partner Portal that comes with marketing tools, technical training material and more.

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In the same vein:

A First Birthday for OpenStack – Adoption is Next

Alex Williams — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 05:38:01 +0000

OpenStack is one-year-old, marking a year that has seen it grow to become one of the leading open source projects in the world.

OpenStack launched last July under the umbrella of the Apache Foundation as an initiative between Rackspace and NASA. Rackspace provided the storage infrastructure and NASA donated its compute technology.

It started with 25 partners. Today OpenStack has 80. There have been three major releases. A fourth release, Diablo, will be released in September.

Today, service providers are showing some of the most interest. Major hosting providers such as Dreamhost have committed to building cloud infrastructures on OpenStack. Korea Telecom has transformed itself into a services provider by building on OpenStack.

A few factor have contributed to OpenStack’s popularity.

People want options. Amazon Web Services and VMware each have their own uses. AWS has driven its growth by servicing the developer community. VMware is for optimizing the enterprise data center. Its goal is to extend that offering for companies to create a virtual infrastructure. But that’s different from AWS and what Citrix is doing, too.

Call it the year of the cloud. The hype for cloud computing has been significant but beneath all of it is a transformation to a data driven world that requires a new kind of infrastructure that can store terabytes of data and offer compute functionality for games, services and apps that run on varying types of operating systems.

Commercial interest. Funding and acquisitions are signs of the market strength behind OpenStack, said Mark Collier, vice president of marketing and business development for OpenStack and Rackspace Cloud Builders. OpenStack had a strategic play in Citrix acquisition of Cloud.com. And Piston was the first startup to receive funding that based its business around the OpenStack infrastructure.

For the next year?

Adoption: “Our goal is to see deployments,” Collier said.

Networking will become a larger focus. For example, Collier says Cisco is investing significantly, dedicating developer resources to the effort.

Federated clouds will emerge. Use cases include the need to burst into public cloud environments and mini clouds for enterprises to serve employees around the world. These mini clouds are similar to content delivery networks at a full application level.

Services Angle

OpenStack will have another boom year. That’s my bet. The growth will be fueled by service providers who need to create a new architecture and provide a new type of service. Important to this is the transformation of the network. The service providers no longer can operate on a network centric model. They need a new network infrastructure to provide an optimized level of service at the lowest cost possible. That means an infrastructure that is virtualized at the machine level and in the network, too.

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In the same vein:

OpenStack Set for Stardom, Supporters Join the Ride

Cherr Aira — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 22:21:16 +0000

The cloud is the future of enterprise, no questions asked. But, where it is heading is quite uncertain. Experts and big names in the industry like Cisco believe that driving open source standards for both public and private clouds will be the next key play. This notion led them to take a chance on OpenStack, a Rackspace project and community that supports over 50 organizations in a large-scale open source cloud.

The potential around this platform lured other keen gamblers within the tech sphere. Yesterday, leading web and application hosting provider DreamHost extended support to OpenStack through Ceph integration.

DreamHost’s Ben Cherian, General Manager of Emerging Technologies, explained how they discovered OpenStack and their confidence in open source platform. He said, “We had originally created Ceph to address an industry need for a commodity-based open source distributed data storage platform. When we learned of the OpenStack project, we saw a real opportunity to apply this technology to a larger community effort. We believe that the future of cloud computing is in open source, and efforts like OpenStack are key to realizing its full potential.”

Meanwhile, Community Manager at OpenStack Stephen Spector returned the favor and expressed thrill about the support saying, “We are excited to strengthen the OpenStack community through the ongoing contributions of DreamHost, a service provider with deep expertise around open source distributed data storage. We welcome DreamHost’s contributions and their shared vision of a scalable and open cloud.”

By virtue of helping customers build real infrastructure-as-a-service clouds that are scalable, efficient and open by design, Citrix formalizes the launch of OpenStack’s commercial version, the Project Olympus. Through this, companies and service providers will be able to easily assemble OpenStack private or public clouds based on real architectures from Dell and Rackspace.

With the future gleaming so bright, open cloud growth becomes a magnet for market competition. QLogic, Hadoop and Cloudera are all rooting for leadership. Hadoop-based Datameer recently bagged $9 million in additional funds from Kleiner Perkins. The recent Hadoop deployments via Cloudera spread across various platforms as big data analytics becomes a major trend within the open source cloud.

IT companies are now driven by cloud adaptation and virtualization. RackSpace’s development of OpenStack is deemed by industry experts as a smart business move. Revolving around honest customer service, the defining feature of OpenStack lies on its prompt and sincere help to its clients.

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