It also includes significant user interface improvements aimed at making it easier to administer with centralized logging and monitoring, according to HPThe release comes just one week after HP said it is shutting down its HP Helion Public Cloud offering effective Jan. 31 as part of a stepped-up focus on managed and virtual private cloud offerings, writes Steven Burke in CRNWhy OpenStack firm Mirantis says China joint venture is key to Asia ambitionsA deal struck with Chinese cloud provider UCloud to build a new jointly-owned OpenStack company is designed to strengthen Mirantis hand in the burgeoning Asian open-source cloud market, says Toby Wolpe in ZDNet. The new company, UMCloud, which already counts the Shenzhen Stock Exchange as a prize customer from an earlier Mirantis push, will sell subscription support to the Mirantis OpenStack distribution, as well as professional services, and training and certification for OpenStack.Hypernetes unites Kubernetes, OpenStack for multitenant container managementHyper, creator of a VM isolated container engine thats compatible with Docker, has debuted a project for running multitenant containers at scale. The Hypernetesproject fuses the Hyper container engine with Kubernetes and uses several pieces from OpenStack to create what it describes as a secure, multitenant Kubernetes distro. More over at InfoWorldMidokura has a new SDN releaseNetwork virtualization software supports OpenStack Liberty and containers, writes Jim Duffy on Network World. For container support, MEM supports the OpenStack Kuryr container plug-in. Kuryr is the gateway between the container networking APIs and use cases, and the Neutron APIs and services, Midokura saysAs OpenStack gains acceptance and adoption, enterprises and other users are searching for the best way to make use of it. The OpenStack market is home to numerous distributions, or distros, including our popular pure-play distribution, called Mirantis OpenStack . When I discuss OpenStack distributions with users, I often encounter three myths:On the surface, this assumption seems to makes sense after all, all OpenStack distros should be interoperable, which means that they should support the same set of core features, and in the same way. Thats the core of the OpenStack Powered program, which specifies a certain tiny subset of OpenStack functionality that must be present before you can call yourself OpenStack.While the community is doing a lot in the area of core OpenStack functionality such as compute, storage, networking, and associated services, its progress on managing the lifecycle of OpenStack is limited. This leaves the distribution vendors to fill in the gaps. Managing the lifecycle of OpenStack falls into two broad buckets: Day-1 and Day-2.Day-1, or deployment, includes initial installation and configuration. Day-2, or operations, includes items such as change management, monitoring, diagnosis, updates and upgrades. All these tasks, as difficult as they are in a distributed environment, become even more complex when performed at scale in a production environment.OpenStack distributions vary wildly when it comes to lifecycle management, from manual command-line installs and log analysis to graphical dashboards. Our latest product, Mirantis OpenStack 7.0 , is probably the furthest ahead of the pack in this area. It includes highly automated deployment through Fuel , monitoring/diagnosis through Zabbix, Log-Metrics-Alerts (ElasticSearch-Heka-Kibana, InfluxDB/ Grafana) and Nagios plugins. It also provides seamless updates and in-service upgrades.Lifecycle management is crucial because OpenStack is always improving, always changing, but that doesnt mean you want to turn over control of when you change with it. You need to be able to decide when and how youre going to move to the next level.Although we tend to think of OpenStack as one big thing, in fact its made up of the combination of multiple individual projects. All OpenStack products must include the core projects, Compute (Nova), Networking (Neutron), Block Storage (Cinder), Object Storage (Swift), Image Service (Glance), and Identity Service (Keystone), but there are literally dozens of other projects that provide additional functionality to an OpenStack cluster.Starting with Liberty, OpenStack is released under the Big Tent governance model , which provides a large number of OpenStack projects from which to choose. How do you decide which ones you need and more importantly, which ones are ready for prime-time Distribution vendors, including Mirantis, make choices in terms of which projects to include in their distribution. For example, in addition to the core projects, Mirantis includes project such as Murano OpenStack application catalog, Sahara OpenStack Big Data project and Fuel for deployment.One important thing about OpenStack distros, however, is that you need to be sure that youre not locked into your distribution vendors choices. For example, you with Mirantis OpenStack you have the option not to install Murano or Sahara if you dont need them but you also have the option to add additional projects. With the right distro, you keep control over the makeup of your OpenStack cloud. Additionally, once a distribution vendor has decided which projects to include, the vendor can further decide which commits/patches to include.
