In this article
In this video and accompanying article OpenMetal CEO, Todd Robinson, discusses with Mark Collier, COO of the OpenInfra Foundation, his vision for how OpenMetal Cloud can be an alternative cloud provider for small businesses.
The below article is a transcription of the video content, edited minimally for clarity.
What is OpenMetal Cloud?
The product itself is essentially a hyperconverged three server control plane. Everything is private to the three servers. In addition to OpenStack there’s a Ceph layer underneath that. But we really focused on trying to make sure that it could be really small. And it’s because, as an entry point, it allows it to be really low cost. But it has everything that you need that you may have to have as a small cloud.
Learn more about OpenMetal Cloud
Why OpenMetal Cloud?
Sometimes people say, “well you can train on a single box”. And of course you can. But what do you do if you need to learn how to live migrate things? What if you need to learn to knock a machine offline and figure out what to do when those things happen? Those are only things that you can do when you actually have a true cluster and you’re running it in the way that, from a production standpoint, in the long run you actually would run it.
So we focused on making sure that it could be small, it could be inexpensive, and that we actually bill by usage on an hourly basis.
Making OpenStack Easy
We looked at the trivial part and I said hey look, if we really want people to say “I’m going to get into this”, it’s got to be something that they trust is trivial, that they can get into, try it, understand it, turn it off, try another one.
Or even, what I think is really interesting for us…When we’re talking to a lot of public cloud providers, typically VPS companies that are running on OpenStack, one of the first things that they say that’s interesting to them is it lets them develop and adopt the new release of OpenStack or the new releases of Ceph. But then also to add additional components.
There are a ton of VPS providers out there running on OpenStack that don’t today offer Kubernetes. Well it’s because it’s a little bit complicated to go through the process to understand: “What’s going to be in here? Do I understand Magnum and Octavia?” Or if they’re doing it that way, “Do I understand, do I know how this is going to work? How do I bill for it?”
Well, guess what? You can fire up a cloud with us in minutes! Have that understanding of how it’s going to work, evaluate it, and make sure that it’s right for your production environment, and go through the process and then apply it back into your production environment.
And so one of the ways I think, I really hope, that we can be valuable to the overall ecosystem now that is running and selling off of OpenStack, is let them develop faster and get onto the more modern stuff.