Keeping an eye on cloud risks, OpenStack training the CERN way and industry shifts a go-go in our weekly roundup.

image

Here’s the news from the OpenStack world you won’t want to miss — the musings, polemics and questions posed by the larger community.

Got something to highlight? Tweet, blog, or email us!

In case you missed it

The sky’s limit
Shifting computer power to the cloud brings many benefits—but don’t ignore the risks

“The rise of cloud computing is rapid, inexorable and causing huge upheaval in the tech industry. The old guard is suffering: this week’s $67 billion merger between Dell and EMC, makers of computers and storage devices respectively, was a marriage forced by the rise of the cloud.” says The Economist.

The venerable weekly also comments on the EMC and Dell merger — citing it as “further proof that the IT industry is remaking itself.”

The OpenStack guide that helps train CERN’s staff
CERN’s TIm Bell on why the OpenStack Cookbook continues to accelerate training for cloud administrators at the ground-breaking research facility.

Liberty Is First OpenStack Release Under ‘Big Tent’ Model
“OpenStack Liberty is noteworthy for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it is the first release under the "Big Tent" model, which takes a more inclusive approach for projects. As such, with OpenStack Liberty, there are more new projects as part of the coordinated release than ever before, including SearchLight search, Zaqar messaging, Barbican key manager, Manila shared file system and Designate DNS services among others,” says Sean Michael Kerner at eweek. Want more? There are another 15 or so articles on the new release, too.

OpenStack Murano Evolving as an On Ramp for Cloud Apps
“For example, if a group of developers has been using Oracle database, they can write a quick Murano wrapper around the Oracle database and expose it as an API-driven service. Renski said organizations can create whole lists of services using Murano that are tailored to the needs of specific development groups,” writes
Sean Michael Kerner at Server Watch in an interview with Boris Renski of Mirantis.

What are containers, and why do they matter to OpenStack?
“The rise of Docker has been astonishing, and the integration between containers and cloud infrastructures is gaining more and more interest. In fact, OpenStack has not one, but three projects that have heavy components aspects to them: Kolla looks at deploying OpenStack using containerized services, Murano provides an easy way to deploy containerized apps using Kubernetes, and Magnum provides an entire orchestration system for containers, or Containers as a Service,” says Fabrizio Soppelsa on the Mirantis blog.

Industry watch

Red Hat acquires Ansible to beef up its development tool set
You can go home again. Ansible, a dev-ops company founded by two Red Hat refugees, is now in the Red Hat fold, writes Fortune’s Barb Darrow. Here’s the press release.

British Telecom threatens to abandon OpenStack in its current form
BT’s chief researcher for data networks, Peter Willis, explained that there were six specific issues for OpenStack to address in order to avoid such an outcome. Connecting Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) to the infrastructure raises a difficulty. Openstack connects sequentially with the sequence serially numbered in the VNF, raising the issue of trying to confirm that the Local Area Network (LAN) has been linked with the right LAN port or whether the Wide Area Network (WAN) has been connected with the right WAN port, writes John Bensalhia in The Stack.

BofA confronts OpenStack problems in data center overhaul
Very few of the 1,500 workloads Bank of America (BofA) is moving to the new architectures every month are running on OpenStack…Instead, the bank has bypassed OpenStack problems by running the 6,500 workloads in production on proprietary SDDC technology from a vendor it declined to name, writes Antone Gonsalves at TechTarget.

Aptira Becomes the First OpenStack SI to Bring Akanda’s Powerful Open Source Network Orchestration Platform to Data Centers Around the World
Akanda and Aptira have partnered to enable customers to harness the power of the Astara platform and rapidly deploy these exciting new networking capabilities to deliver end-to-end open source clouds.  Aptira is the leading provider of OpenStack in the APAC region, offering private and hybrid cloud solutions to meet the most demanding specifications.
“At Aptira we’ve built our reputation providing our customers with the best suited and highest value solutions – delivering innovation rather than yesterday’s technologies,” said Tristan Goode, CEO of Aptira.

Mirantis and NetApp cement alliance with OpenStack handshake
Mirantis and NetApp have formed a partnership to embed into Mirantis OpenStack support for the Manila management interface for provisioning and attaching shared filesystems, including NFS and CIFS, reports The Register.

Dell. EMC. HP. Cisco. These Tech Giants Are the Walking Dead
The Cloud. The term has taken on so many meanings in recent years. But keep in mind: most of these meanings come from IBM, HP, EMC, Dell, Cisco, and other companies that don’t want to be fucked by it. The best way to think about The Cloud is this: It’s the way that the giants of the Internet—aka Amazon, Google, and Facebook—build their businesses,” Writes Cade Metz at Wired.

Cloud chatter

We feature user conversations throughout the week, so tweet, blog, or email us!

alt text here

Cover Photo // CC BY NC

Superuser