Cloudscaling joined the Alliance as a Contributor member and will participate with the Alliance’s Infrastructure Technical Workgroup to further the development of usage models developed by the Alliance. Contributor members are selected and approved by the organization’s Steering Committee.

Participation in the ODCA contributes to Cloudscaling’s development of hardware blueprints. The blueprints comprise a layer of the recently announced Cloudscaling Open Cloud System (OCS) that defines production-grade server and networking combinations that deliver predictable technical and economic performance to meet specific design requirements. Blueprints show how to implement cloud resource block designs in physical hardware to meet design requirements for security, availability and subscription rates.

The Cloudscaling OCS is an infrastructure-as-a-service solution for cloud-ready applications. It offers the cost, performance and scalability benefits of Amazon Web Services for private or public clouds. In addition to hardware blueprints, the Cloudscaling OCS includes the Cloudscaling Open Cloud Operating System (OS). Based on OpenStack technology, the Cloudscaling Open Cloud OS leverages the company’s expertise designing and deploying production OpenStack clouds for clients such as KT (formerly Korea Telecom), Internap and others.

Beyond open hardware blueprints and open source software in the Open Cloud OS, other open components of the Cloudscaling OCS include open networking and open APIs.

“We’re thrilled to be a part of ODCA, because it has made impressive progress in a short period of time to define best practices and prototypical standards through the publication of its usage models,” said Caleb Tennis, Cloudscaling’s liaison to ODCA. “The combination of our experience designing, building and operating production-grade clouds for large clients with the experience and resource of the other 300-plus members means we can move the ball forward more quickly and get to the place where service providers and enterprises can make sound, facts-based decisions about cloud infrastructure deployment.”

“The success of the ODCA is based upon the contributions of members who have extensive cloud engineering and operations expertise,” said Jason Waxman, general manager in Intel’s Data Center and Connected Systems Group leading the Cloud Infrastructure Group (CIG). Intel serves as technical advisor to the Alliance. “With engineering talent combined with strong data center operations expertise and experience building production scale clouds for large organizations, Cloudscaling will strengthen the ODCA’s Infrastructure Technical Workgroup.”

About Cloudscaling
Cloudscaling is the leading provider of open cloud infrastructure solutions for enterprises, service providers and governments. The Cloudscaling Open Cloud System (OCS) is the first infrastructure-as-a-service solution based on OpenStack technology that delivers the cost, performance and scalability benefits of production-grade public cloud services but inside the customer’s datacenter and under their control.

Cloudscaling has more production OpenStack experience than any other company, including successful deployments with customers such as KT (formerly Korea Telecom) Internap. The Cloudscaling team are industry veterans who have designed and deployed large-scale cloud infrastructure for cloud pioneers such as Amazon Web Services, NASA, GoGrid, RightScale and eBay.

Founded in 2006, Cloudscaling is headquartered in San Francisco. More at http://cloudscaling.com.

About The Open Data Center Alliance
The Open Data Center Alliance is an independent IT consortium comprised of global IT leaders who have come together to provide a unified customer vision for long-term data center requirements. The Alliance is led by a thirteen member steering committee which includes IT leaders BMW, Capgemini, China Life, China Unicom, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Lockheed Martin, Marriott International, Inc., National Australia Bank, NTT DATA, Terremark, Disney Technology Solutions and Services, and UBS.

In support of its mission, the Alliance has delivered the first customer requirements for cloud computing documented in eight Open Data Center Usage Models which identify member prioritized requirements to resolve the most pressing challenges facing cloud adoption. Find out more at opendatacenteralliance.org.

News release posted online at PRWeb.

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Media Contact:
Robert Cathey
robert@cloudscaling.com
865-386-6118
@robertcathey

For those who are new to OpenStack or simply haven’t had time to delve into it’s innards, Nova uses a core asynchronous RPC/messaging system to communicate between components.  Asynchronous message passing systems are key tools in building scalable systems.  They are used in many different ways depending on the type of system you are building.  Nova has traditionally used RabbitMQ, which is an excellent choice for many.

Cloudscaling felt that RabbitMQ added unnecessary complexity to Nova deployments given what the requirements were for an asynchronous RPC message passing mechanism.  Rabbit provides a number of value added features such as store-and-forward of messages, which can actually be problematic at larger scale.  In addition, Rabbit is a centralized, broker-based model that requires deploying it in High Availability (HA) pairs and combining this with clustering (multiple HA pairs in parallel) for scaling.  We felt this was not an ideal scenario for larger Nova deployments.

The result is a completely broker-less, peer-to-peer, asynchronous message passing system based on 0MQ (ZeroMQ).  This open source pluggable driver for Nova has no centralized broker, requires no HA components, and is distributed amongst all of the Nova components.  The ZeroMQ plugin that Cloudscaling created is roughly 700 lines of Python code that plugs into the Nova Queue Abstraction Layer (QAL).  It leverages the ZeroMQ library (written in C), which is fast, portable, and proven at scale.  You will find that this plugin not only removes complexity in how Nova does messaging, but also has its performance scale linearly with the number of components.

As a brief aside, this is an example of how Cloudscaling intends to help create choice and increase the robustness and scalability of OpenStack, while reducing complexity.  Last year, we pushed back the pluggable QAL interface to OpenStack in Diablo with a driver for RabbitMQ, which maintained all functionality, while allowing us to have a place to plug in ZeroMQ in the future.  Now, as of Essex, Stackers can choose RabbitMQ or ZeroMQ depending on what they think their needs are.  We hope this is an approach that others in the community will choose.

Eric’s presentation on the ZeroMQ RPC driver for Nova is below.  It describes how ZeroMQ works and provides more depth on how it was implemented.

That was in July of 2010. What I said was:

“OpenStack, with a strong community behind it, should be an important tool for service providers and large telcos to compete at scale with the Amazon and Googles of this world.”

It’s nearly two years later, and there is definitely a ‘strong community behind’ OpenStack. More than 165 companies have joined the project, from startups to multinational giants. And they’re not just lurking and watching. They’re contributing code. In fact, more than 200 Stackers from 55 companies contributed to Essex, the release announced last week. Want more diversity? There are more than 20 global user groups, and there are 2,600 members of the technical community.

But is OpenStack becoming ‘an important tool for service providers and large telcos to compete at scale’?

There’s no doubt about it. Companies from KT and Internap to Deutsche Telekom and HP have launched production-grade deployments on OpenStack. Beyond these marquee deployments, consider the 100,000 downloads to date.

And remember, it’s not even two years old yet.

Today, the OpenStack community is taking the next step toward becoming the most profound open source movement since Linux. Eighteen companies have stepped forward as platinum or gold members of the OpenStack Foundation. These companies are making a financial commitment to help assure the long-term, independent success of the community. Each of them committed code to Essex. They’re vested.

One of the things that makes OpenStack work is its open development process where technical  meritocracy drives the code. The community is simply too diverse for one company to impose its will. With the formation of the foundation, this philosophy becomes codified into the DNA of how OpenStack functions.

Credit Where It’s Due
I’d be remiss if I didn’t call out Rackspace for their thoughtful and balanced stewardship of the project to this point. Jim Curry, Mark Collier and their team have guided OpenStack toward today’s foundation announcement. Rackspace, and the entire OpenStack community know that the formation of the OpenStack Foundation is the correct next step to move the mantle of leadership to the community itself.

Getting on With What’s Next
It’s as true today as it was in July of 2010. OpenStack will succeed because of the diversity, engagement and energy of the community building it. And we’re not done building that community. There are tough questions to answer about governance and competition. But as the community takes care of its internal business, the market will take care of the competitive issues.

To my fellow Stackers, we’ll see you next week at the Summit to get on with the business of self governance. And join us on Monday night for a party with our co-hosts SolidFire and RightScale. There’s plenty to celebrate.