Demystifying Open Source Cloud: What You Need to Know

In this blog:

• What Are Open Source Clouds?
• Why Turn To Open Source Clouds?
• The Benefits Of Open Source Clouds
• Open Source Cloud Solution

If you’re searching for a solution to take full control of your infrastructure, you might have come across the term “open source cloud.” But what exactly is it?

In this comprehensive blog, we’ll dive deep into the concept of open source clouds and explore why they are the ultimate key to empowering organizations. From understanding the basics to the benefits and use cases, this guide covers everything you need to know. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to unlock the full potential of your infrastructure with open source clouds.

What Are Open Source Clouds?

Open source clouds are cloud computing platforms constructed utilizing open source software and technologies. They are not owned or operated by a single vendor. The beauty of open source clouds is that the code is developed collaboratively by a community of developers and users. It is a wonderful community where some contribute to the code, others test the software in multiple scenarios, providing feed back and flagging bugs. This a collaborative effort from the global open source community to develop, improve and maintain the software code.

Open source clouds may have been late to arrive on the cloud scene but they were not too far behind proprietary clouds. Open source clouds solutions have been available to the public since 2008 with OpenStack making its debut in 2010.

Why are Public Cloud Users Turning to Open Source Cloud Solutions?

It’s important to note that not all open source cloud users aren’t actually jumping ship. Hybrid clouds are becoming increasingly popular with organizations opting to use multiple cloud vendors and models. Many organizations have a combination of public and private cloud infrastructure. The rise in open source cloud solutions is not necessarily a signal of the demise of public cloud but rather an indication that public cloud alone cannot satisfy the needs of the individual organizations. Now base on my experience with public cloud users who are not happy, here are some key reasons why public cloud users are looking for alternative cloud solutions:

Security Breaches

All clouds have vulnerabilities but proprietary codes are private so organizations do not know what additional security measures they may need to implement on public clouds. There have been several high profile security breaches over the years that affected major organizations such as 2019 Capital One caused by a misconfiguration in the firewall of a public cloud environment and 2020 Garmin which is believed to the result of a vulnerability in the cloud platform itself. Major organizations falling victim to security breaches beyond their control has made many organizations very conscious of little control they have over their cloud infrastructure with public cloud providers.

Data Loss

If all your data is held by one vendor, should anything happen to that vendor all your data disappears. Often temporarily but that’s usually long enough to significantly affect your ability to serve your clients or damage your reputation with your customer base. Some of the most notable outages in cloud history are:

• AWS 2017: Which lasted several hours and many apps and websites that relied of AWS were inaccessible during the other.
• Microsoft Azure 2020: In September 2020 Azure experience a major outage that left many of its cloud services including Azure Active Directory and Azure DevOps unavailable.
• Google Cloud 2021: In June 2021, GCP experience a cloud outage that lasted several hours. During this time key Google services such as Google Drive, Google Meet, and Google Docs were inaccessible.

During all three outages, organizations that relied on these cloud providers had issues accessing their data and applications. It’s pretty startling to accept that major cloud providers have vulnerabilities but every system has its weakness. The truly unsettling part is having to give your cloud provider so much power where hiccups in their services can cripple your organization.

Data redundancy is one of the key benefits of hybrid cloud solutions. Not only do you back up data on different servers, but you have your data replicated across vendors and at various geographical locations. Now the likelihood of multiple providers facing down time simultaneously is almost impossible considering most cloud vendors have 99.999% uptime.

Compliance

Some industries have very stringent compliance regulations, the lack of transparency over data security with proprietary code makes it more complex for organizations to meet their compliance requirement.

Cost

If your organizations works with large amounts of data or high performance computing needs then public cloud can become costly very quickly. For perspective, On-Demand OpenStack Clouds by OpenMetal cost approximately 80% less than AWS. If you want to look more closely at a price comparison with AWS and open source cloud, you can visit our AWS Alternatives page for specs and price break down.

Vendor Conscious

Public cloud vendors like AWS may be a competitor to your organization or your clients. Most businesses selling consumer goods can consider AWS a competitor, so they won’t want to contribute to their profitability either by using their cloud services directly or using software from SaaS providers who use AWS as their cloud provider.

The Benefits of Open Source Clouds

Power in Numbers

The communitive method of developing open source code means that it’s not built to achieve a narrow object. When organizations build proprietary code, it is usually done to feel a need they identify in the market and then marketed and sold to fill that need. Sure they may use focus groups to guide in the development of their product so that it meets the needs of the target audience but there’s few focus groups that can match the feed back of the open source community. To put magnitude into perspective there are over 540, 000 contributors to the OpenInfra foundation. Now it’s unlikely that all of those contributors work on every open source project but just think about what a team of 10 engineers could accomplish, not imagine if that team was 100  1,000 or 10,000 engineers?

Customization

Open source code is open to the general public, this means teams and individuals are able to add any code, or build plug ins / complimentary software to customize the code to fit their specific use case. And in the interest of benefiting the community, any modifications are made available to the public. The result is a highly customizable solution where users have access to the source code and can modify it to meet their specific needs.

Transparent Code

With the software publicly available, it allows organizations to identify security vulnerabilities and implement measure to protect themselves. This also means that any issue or glitch can be identified and resolved without depending on a vendor solution. With proprietary solutions organizations need to trust in their vendor to provide them with clean and reliable code.

Cost Effective

There are no licensing fees or proprietary costs associated with using open source cloud solutions. This often results in more economical solutions.

Interoperability

Open source clouds are designed to interoperate with other open source technologies. This makes it easier to integrate popular open source technologies like Kubernetes, Ceph, Ansible, etc. into your cloud system.

With significantly lower cost, full transparency, complete control of your cloud, and an army of open source developers consistently working to improve your cloud software at no cost to you, it’s not surprising that many organizations are looking more closely at open source cloud solutions.

Open Source Cloud Solution

OpenStack is a powerful open source cloud computing software platform that serves as a multi-tool for managing server infrastructure. OpenStack’s automates the process of providing resources to users through an API. It was initially developed through a collaborative effort between NASA and RackSpace. OpenStack streamlines the process of integrating servers, storage, and networking components into a data center. It also provides user-friendly systems that allow end-users to easily deploy and utilize these resources via Virtual Machines (VMs) and attached storage. OpenStack is widely recognized as an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform that prioritizes scalability, security, and straightforward implementation. Quick scalability is also a key advantage of OpenStack, allowing users to increase or decrease resources as their needs change.

To power its platform, OpenStack combines various open-source components often called projects that form its core. Once deployed, users can access these components and APIs to manage infrastructure resources.

Here are some of the main components of OpenStack:

• Nova: This component provisions virtual servers or compute instances. Nova supports the creation of virtual machines, bare metal servers, and limited system containers. Keystone, Glance, Neutron, and Placement components are required for basic Nova functionality.
• Neutron: Implements the OpenStack Networking API, providing network connectivity as a service between interface devices managed by other OpenStack services such as Nova.
• Cinder: This component is OpenStack’s Block Storage service that provides volume (storage) to Nova virtual machines, bare metal hosts, containers, and more. Cinder is highly available, fault-tolerant, and recoverable, and it’s component-based with the ability to add new behaviors quickly.
• Horizon: Provides a web-based user interface to OpenStack services, serving as the platform’s dashboard.
• Keystone: This component provides API client authentication, service discovery, and distributed multi-tenant authorization by implementing OpenStack’s Identity API, which generates authentication tokens that allow access to OpenStack services.

To learn more about OpenStack components, you can check out our blog post on What Are The Projects That Make Up OpenStack?

At OpenMetal, open source is more than just a passion – it’s at the core of everything we do. Our product core is built using OpenStack and backed by Ceph, while clouds are deployed using Kolla Ceph and Kolla Ansible. We believe that amazing yet complex open source software such as OpenStack should be accessible to individuals and organizations of all sizes. That’s why we created a fully Hyper-Converged Private OpenStack Cloud Core that can be spun up in less than 1 minute. Our goal is to make it easy for small organizations, and even individuals, to meaningfully contribute to the open-source community without needing to invest hundreds of thousands in hardware and months of labor to get an OpenStack cloud up and running.