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OpenStack individual director Shane Wang is an engineering manager in Intel’s cloud and networking team. He’s in his fifth year on the board and seven years as a part of the OpenStack community, where he’s been involved with numerous projects including Nova, Glance, Keystone, Horizon, Quantum, Cinder, Ceilometer and Openstack-manuals.
Wang talks about the great virtual machine debate, what open infrastructure means to him and, as we look ahead to the Shanghai Summit, offers insight into open-source adoption in China.
What’s your favorite/most important OpenStack debate?
There’s been discussion around containers vs. virtual machines (VMs), and different orchestration options. We have airplanes, cars and trains, in the same way that we have containers, virtual machines and bare metal. None of these can replace the other; all of these will co-exist. We need all of these, depending on the use case, or workload. If you ask telco carriers, many of them will tell you that containers cannot satisfy the computation performance needs or requirements that their businesses demand.
Meanwhile, online shopping sites gravitate to containers; one of the largest online retailers in China boasts the largest Kubernetes cluster in the world. Clearly, these businesses are different and each requires a different approach. Some projects are simply more mature than others. OpenStack is simply more mature than Kubernetes. If your family has a new baby, all the attention will be focused on the new baby because the new baby needs more care than older siblings! In the future, I suspect we will have new technologies to satisfy new scenarios that are neither containers nor VMs.
What are your insights on the significant adoption of open source — and OpenStack — in China?
More and more Chinese companies are adopting OpenStack. In China, there are more users of OpenStack than contributors to OpenStack. Users, like state-owned enterprises, are interested in adopting OpenStack, but don’t have the resources to contribute to the code. Through initiatives like the Open Source Hackathon series, we’re working to encourage developers from China to contribute to OpenStack, and we’re hoping to attract more users as contributors.
As OpenStack has evolved to open infrastructure, what does the term mean to you?
Collaboration. Initially, OpenStack aimed to solve the problem of the infrastructure layer. However, we’re seeing more and more user scenarios emerging — software-defined networking (SDN) and SDN controllers, NFV, software-defined storage (SDS), edge computing, AI cloud. OpenStack can’t meet all of the requirements demanded by these workloads. We have Kata Containers to address the needs of secure containers and we have StarlingX to tackle the challenges of edge computing. We need more and more projects — and collaboration between projects — to create solutions for different use cases.
- OpenStack Homebrew Club: Meet the sausage cloud - July 31, 2019
- Building a virtuous circle with open infrastructure: Inclusive, global, adaptable - July 30, 2019
- Using Istio’s Mixer for network request caching: What’s next - July 22, 2019
