Infrastructure software is dead. Long live infrastructure software.

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Mirantis Co-Founder and CMO Boris Renski recently stirred discussion with his blog post that infrastructure software is dead. At this year’s OpenStack Days Silicon Valley, he sat down with Battery Ventures Technology Fellow Adrian Cockcroft to talk about the changing paradigms in software and in delivery models, and the results were not what you might think.
In general, there are two different methods for deploying software.  Traditionally, in the pre-cloud paradigm, software is deployed as a monolithic package.  You deploy it, and 6 months, or 12 months, or 7 years later, when a new version comes out, you basically throw it out and start again, hoping your data and processes will still be compatible with the new version.
But those days are over, Boris argued in his blog post.  They simply aren&8217;t sustainable. Things move too fast; improvements are available for months or years before you can take advantage of them under this model.  So what do you do instead?
That question was on the mind of most of the audience for Boris and Adrian&8217;s discussion.
OpenStack and the old way
In the early days of Mirantis, Boris explained, the company used the pre-cloud paradigm, where the product is packaged as a whole, delivered, and then periodically updated. They quickly learned — and as anyone who has attempted to upgrade OpenStack knows — this isn’t feasible for OpenStack, which itself uses the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) model.
What&8217;s more, as cloud technology proliferates, the shift in paradigm away from traditional, pre-cloud views has become less about software and more about the delivery model.
So what do you do?
You abstract. Boris clarified this shift in paradigm with AWS as an example. AWS users aren’t provided the infrastructure software but rather an API to the interface. That way, AWS can change whatever it needs to in the infrastructure software without disrupting clients and users.
But it&8217;s more than that, Adrian explains. People initially want something that works without change — until they need a new feature. Such project-based thought was built on the fact that coding is expensive and slow, which is why bundling a package periodically was the norm. Now, with procuring hardware and downloading software from places like Github taking minutes, the purchasing and deployment cycle has collapsed. A deployment can take seconds simply by firing up a Docker container.
Basically, the entire reason for bundling has gone away.
Taking advantage of the new software paradigm
To adapt, the software community has learned to break everything into microservices that can deploy independently, resulting in lots of versions of things constantly changing.
But … doesn’t that break a lot then? Of course, Boris explained, but because you end up with a series of very small steps, it’s actually easier to detect problems and roll back to the previous version. As programmers will recognize, this is the same process used to debug, one step at a time, and it allows continuous change.
This process also solves the issues that arise regarding operations when updates need to be made. Previously, you’d have to wonder if you needed to bring all or part of your system down to make the updates. With containerized OpenStack services, you could upgrade each one independently.
And don’t forget the security benefits of updating in place.
Exploits of exposed software are proliferating, and as Adrian says, people are still downloading the same old vulnerable applications. He advised building around good source components that you can verify with services like JFrog Xray and use security scanners (Docker has one) to check your products.
Looking at the future
There are still a lot of issues that need solutions, of course.
Adrian pointed out that managing a multi-vendor dependency tree is a complex problem with no good fix. “You have to figure out how to keep everything going while trying to change everything,” he explained.
The goal is to keep the “northbound” components, that is, the APIs and so on, that developers want to use, evolving, but remember that the “southbound,” or hardware-facing components, act as constraints. This problem requires collaboration and partnerships to support these devices and to work out ways to get all the versions of hardware and software to work together.
Missed this year&8217;s OpenStack Days Silicon Valley? You can see the whole panel. Just head on over to the OpenStack Days Silicon Valley 2016 videos page and scroll down to “Infrastructure Software Is Dead…Or Is It?”
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Six reasons OpenStack fails (Hint: it’s not the technology)

The post Six reasons OpenStack fails (Hint: it’s not the technology) appeared first on Mirantis | The Pure Play OpenStack Company.
We know OpenStack is hard. But why?
Earlier this month, Christian Carrasco gave a keynote address at the OpenStack Days Silicon Valley conference, discussing six factors behind OpenStack evaluation and deployment failure — and how to solve those problems. As Cloud Advisor at Tapjoy, Carrasco is architecting a 550-million-user cloud based on both private and public resources. He also has a history as CTO of a private cloud hardware company and two other startups focused on cloud technologies, so he brought a lot of insight into the causes of failure, pinpointing six primary points of failure.
Lesson 1: Leave the dogma at home
Dogmatic views, or beliefs accepted as fact without doubt, are blinders, he explained, and they can come from a variety of sources, including bad previous experiences with technology. For example, Carrasco’s experience with OpenStack five years earlier had been a negative experience because the platform just wasn’t ready. Fast-forward five years to 2016, and it’s now rock-solid for many applications, including his.
However, if dogma had prevailed, trying OpenStack again might have been out of the running. Keep in mind, though, that rebranding old technology as new, or new technology as old, or even rebranding fake technology as its legitimate counterpart can lead to a poor experience that gets associated with that real technology. (See Lesson 5.)
Lesson 2: Fear, doubt, uncertainty, and doom (aka FUDD) can cause problems
Remember when Linux was first launched? If you do, then you probably also remember the a proliferation of scare tactics. Your world will end if you use Linux! Nothing will work! Licensing is too confusing! Cats and dogs, living together, total chaos!
OpenStack has seen the same kind of FUDD. Every year, independent publications, public entities, and skewed statistical reports predict the death of OpenStack. And yet, OpenStack keeps on keeping on, taking over the private cloud market.
Lesson 3: Find the right distribution
The third reason Carrasco covered was the “You picked the wrong trunk” scenario. The latest version of open source software such as OpenStack is called the “trunk”, a base repository of code. The thing about trunk is that it requires lots of tweaking and the modules aren’t always in tune with each other. Community Linux trunks can have some configurations tweaked but not all, and it still requires a level of expertise, so deploying from trunk is not for less-experienced engineers.
Lesson 4: You are not a full-stack engineer
In today&8217;s world, where personnel often have to fulfill multiple roles, many engineers are being told they have to be &8220;full-stack engineers.&8221;
Carrasco, who has worked the full stack and still says he’s not a full-stack engineer, believes full-stack engineers are myths, and he makes a great argument for his belief. It’s really hard to be a full-stack engineer, he says, because you have to be proficient in every realm of the stack &8212; and it&8217;s not just the software. Just being proficient in software stack is difficult, but when you throw in the hardware side, as well as networking, security, and so on, being an expert in everything is a monumental, if not impossible, task.
Organizations need to be aware of the skillset of the people leading the OpenStack deployment and be sure they&8217;ve got all of their bases covered.
Lesson 5: You thought OpenStack was a better buggy for your horse
OpenStack isn’t necessarily a better buggy, or a cheaper method of doing something, or the open source way of doing something. Carrasco says it’s more of a paradigm shift, a new methodology that is still evolving, in the way data centers operate. And the reality is that sometimes this methodology isn’t ideal for traditional businesses.
Lesson 6: You didn&8217;t have a sufficient team
While the rumotrs that you need dozens of experts to successfully deploy OpenStack is an exaggeration, you&8217;re likely going to have problems if you try to deployed it alone, or with a very small team that isn&8217;t ready to deploy data center technology.
If you need help with your OpenStack deployment, there are plenty of options available for design, architecture, and verification of your stack, from automated tools to semi- and fully-managed services.
Along the same lines, some companies aren’t really ready for OpenStack yet, and it may not be economically feasible for a small company to hire a cloud team, purchase hardware, and rack up costs.
On the other hand, some companies lend themselves well to deployment, such as companies that were born online, are making the move to online, or are ready to stop using buggies and be committed and engaged to moving to the next generation of #cloud computing.
OK, so what do I do about it?
Carrasco offers two major solutions to help prevent OpenStack deployment failure.
The first thing Carrasco asks companies he advises is &8220;Where is your Cloud Officer?&8221; If you’ve made a multi-million dollar investment in your cloud and it’s a side project of some other team in your company, that&8217;s not a recipe for success. “What happens to clouds that become orphaned?” he asks. “They become security risks. They become a headache. Nobody wants to work with them, and they vanish,&8221; he says. There needs to be real ownership for your cloud to succeed, and a Cloud Officer will protect your cloud, prevent vendor lock-in, and bring the cloud in line with the organization’s initiatives.
The second solution he suggested is all about vendors. Despite the open nature and coopetition of OpenStack, according to Carrasco, the status quo consists of both public and private vendors fiercely guarding their territory and coming up with creative ways to lock users into their service or their cloud technology, etc., and few companies are creating ways to enable outside operability.
Carrasco’s ultimate vision for a solution is to adopt what he calls a hyper-converged cloud. In this architecture, you have your cloud and your assets powered by multiple vendors &8212; whoever you want to choose to power your cloud. This structure has an added advantage of opening possibilities for niche providers of services not offered by private or public clouds.
The point is not about technology, but about people being able to own their assets. Carrasco is instituting this concept successfully now at Tapjoy, but for this concept to work, interoperability standards are key. Oh, and to those who’d say it’s late for standards, Carrasco points to market research that shows cloud technology is still a tiny speck on the radar when compared to the market share of other tech industries.
So stop trying to make a better buggy, Carrasco says, and focus on making the next-generation cloud.
You can see the entire speech on the OpenStack Days Silicon Valley website.
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What’s new in Mirantis OpenStack 9.0: Webinar Q&A

The post What’s new in Mirantis OpenStack 9.0: Webinar Q&A appeared first on Mirantis | The Pure Play OpenStack Company.
Theres’s never been a better time to adopt Mirantis OpenStack to build your cloud. The newest release, Mirantis OpenStack 9.0, offers improvements in simplicity, flexibility, and performance that make deployment, operations, and management faster and easier.
If you missed the July 14 webinar highlighting the rich new features in Mirantis OpenStack 9.0, we’ve got you covered. The webinar’s panel included three Mirantis experts: Senior Director of Product Marketing Amar Kapadia, Senior Manager of Technical Marketing Joseph Yep, and Senior Product Manager Durgaprasad (a.k.a. DP) Ayyadevara.
They talked about the ways in which MOS 9.0 improves the “Day 2” experience of operating your cloud once you&8217;ve deployed it, as well as easier deployment of workloads, and especially improvements in the management of features related to NFV, such as SR-IOV, software acceleration DPDK and NUMA/CPU pinning.
Here&8217;s a selection of questions and answers from those who attended.
Q: Can any plugin be added after initial deployment without disruption?
A: Not all plugins. However, the plugin framework has added metadata and developer functionality that allow developers to build and test their plugins so they can be added as “hot-pluggable.” This means this capability is specific to the plugins themselves as well as with the settings, which are dependent on the environment and type of change to determine whether there will be disruption. An example is StackLight’s Toolchain, which is hot-pluggable post-deployment.
Q: As far as upgrading from Mirantis OpenStack 8.0 to 9.0, is there documentation available for that?
A: Documentation is readily available and always improving. Because upgrades are challenging for large distributed infrastructure software, Mirantis continually creates tooling to make the process smoother and more automated. Feedback on the documentation is always welcome.
Q: Does the new release support SDN and Contrail?
A: Yes. Currently, the Control field plugin is available for Liberty-compatible release, and Contrail is the Mitaka-compatible version.
Q: The current base OS is Ubuntu 14.04, but are there any plans to upgrade to 16.04?
A: Yes. Operating systems are regularly validated, so 16 is on the roadmap.
Q: With the new release allowing updates to your previously-deployed OpenStack environment, can we also apply a new plugin with Fuel on a deployed environment?
A: Yes, unless it a previous version. For example, with Fuel 9, you can’t deploy a new plugin push deployment to a MOSS 7 environment without having to upgrade the environment itself. However, Fuel can manage multiple versions of Mirantis OpenStack environments.
Q: What is the status on Ironic and VX LAN?
A: Both are supported in 9.0.
Q: Does Murano support deployment of Kubernetes clusters?
A: Yes, absolutely. We do a lot with Kubernetes work, and there’s a new set of announcements coming soon about the work.
Q: What NFV features make Mirantis’ value-add different from others, and how can enterprises benefit from this feature?
A: Mirantis’ value-add is twofold. First, we support all Intel Enhanced Platform Awareness features. Second, we have provisioned for enabling and configuring these features through Fuel. We also support partners like 6WIND, who have DPDK accelerators, and we have Fuel plugins for that. So, we focus on making it easy to operationalize, and that differentiates us.
Q: How can you differentiate Mirantis from services hosted elsewhere, AWS for example?
A: Fundamentally, this compares two different things, a private cloud to a public cloud environment. You will find similarity at the IaaS layer. However, OpenStack is an open system that allows you to choose the components you want. For example, you can add an SDN like Contrail. Thus, in the PaaS, the two deviate considerably. Amazon is prescriptive, choosing the software available to offer customers. Conversely, OpenStack works with a multitude of partners so customers can tailor solutions that work best for them. If they want, for example, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, they can have it. If they want Kubernetes as a container framework, they can have it. If they want a specific database or NoSQL database, they can use Murano and publish that database.
Q: How many nodes are required to deploy OpenStack in Mirantis OpenStack 9.0?
A: Depending on the function, the lower limit is three. If running it virtualized, you could do it all physically on a single machine, but the nodes specifically will be your field master node if you’re using Fuel (you don’t have to use Fuel), which would then deploy to a single controller and a single compute host. This is one of the most minimal deployments if you’re looking at playing with features and practicing deployment, and it means you could conceivably run it on a laptop, though this isn’t advised for running a production deployment. There are instructions for running it in VirtualBox as well.
This is just a tiny fraction of what we covered, of course. Interested in hearing more?  You can view the whole presentation online, or download Mirantis OpenStack 9.0 for yourself.
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HPE loses Bill Hilf, gains SGI, among buyout rumors

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Yes, you read that right, HPE is also the subject of rumors of a private equity buyout.  In this case, Reuters reports that several firms, including Apollo Global Management, which is also said to be looking at Rackspace, are looking at buying either all of HPE, or just its software businesses such as Autonomy.   
The company announced August 1 that it will be reorganizing (again), this time moving the HP Helion OpenStack product under the Enterprise Group, as part of the Software-Defined & Cloud Group (SDCG), led by Ric Lewis.  As part of this restructuring, senior vice president and general manager of HP Cloud Bill Hilf will be leaving the company “to pursue other opportunities”.  
According to a classy farewell email reprinted in GeekWire, Hilf said &8220;“Like many other companies, there comes a time where you naturally mainstream specific technologies into the broader product strategies, and now is the right time to integrate our Helion software assets more deeply into HPE SW and EG.  In 2016, Cloud is now part of every product strategy at HPE, so this makes good sense to integrate, versus maintain a stand-alone division.
“For me personally, when I joined, I made a commitment to build the cloud business here at HP for three years, and I’m now 3 years and one month in, and we have had very strong growth – just this past June HPE Helion was recognized as a leader in the private cloud market for the third year in a row.  So this is the right time for me to help move the technologies and teams more deeply into the company, and to pursue new opportunities.”
Meanwhile, in other news, HP has bought big data analytics firm SGI for $275 million to shore up its position in high performance computing (HPC) and data analytics. According to SDN Central, &8220;HPE says the SGI acquisition helps it expand its presence in key verticals such as government, research, and life sciences.&8221;
Resources

HPE cloud boss Bill Hilf departs the company
Private equity firms eye HPE’s software business for acquisition
Hewlett Packard Enterprise shakes up its cloud business, cloud leader Bill Hilf leaving company
HPE loses its cloud and storage heads: No Goel, Vrij packs up, Fink runs
Silicon Graphics (SGI) Stock Up After-Hours on HP Enterprise Deal
HPE Buys Big Data Analytics Company SGI for $275M

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Mirantis supports SUSE with Mirantis OpenStack, SUSE supports Mirantis OpenStack with RHEL

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Events often include product or company announcements, and OpenStack Days Silicon Valley was no exception, with Mirantis following up its recent announcement that it would work with Intel and Google to rearchitect OpenStack for containers and continuous delivery with the news that it would partner with SUSE to ensure that Mirantis OpenStack can run on that distribution — and a couple of other important ones.
Mirantis CMO and Co-Founder Boris Renski joked that as MOS has always supported Ubuntu and had agreements for Oracle Linux support, the addition of SUSE meant that there was just one major Linux distribution missing, but one that was about to be resolved.
SUSE, you see, in addition to providing SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), provides support for customers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) — and now they would do the same for Mirantis customers.
As you might imagine, Red Hat, which used to be an investor in Mirantis but had a falling out in recent years, was none-too-thrilled with the announcement.  “We aren’t clear what kind of support Mirantis and SUSE can claim to provide for another company&8217;s offerings,” Margaret Dawson, senior director of product marketing at Red Hat told CRN. &8220;but this makes no sense to us, and it would certainly be confusing and potentially dangerous for customers.&8221;
Red Hat has always maintained that the best way to create a solution such as OpenStack is through &8220;co-engineering&8221;, in which the operating system and OpenStack distribution are provided by the same vendor and that it&8217;s &8220;unheard of&8221; for one vendor to support another vendor&8217;s product.
&8220;Enterprise support agreements have often seen vendors willing to take on the support of other vendors’ products,&8221; wrote Ian Murphy in EnterpriseTimes. &8220;This is nothing new, and in many cases, those agreements are not subject to any agreement between vendors. In the Open Source market where access to the source code is part of the deal, companies are often willing to do whatever it takes to ensure software runs smoothly.&8221;
The issue here, of course, is that some companies take exception to the notion of being locked into a single vendor&8217;s products and want flexibility.  That is, in fact, how SUSE wound up supporting RHEL in the first place — it&8217;s a part of their offer for customers who are ready to move off RHEL onto SUSE but need support during the transition.
Mark Smith, a Global Products and Solutions Manager from SUSE, was quick to point out that the announcement in no way signals a pullback from OpenStack for the company. &8220;There is no change in our commitment to OpenStack. This is just about allowing customers to choose which OpenStack they want to run on SUSE Enterprise Linux.”
According to the arrangement, Mirantis will offer Level 1 and Level 2 support for any RHEL-related issues and will call on SUSE for any Level 3 issues that arise with customers.  Mirantis offers packages that include 1-year and 3-year subscriptions, with up to 24x7x365 email and phone support, with a one-hour guaranteed response time.
Resources

Mirantis and SUSE: Creating a One-Stop Shop for OpenStack Support on Major Linux Distros
Mirantis Partners with SUSE to Deliver Complete Enterprise Linux Support
Mirantis Sidesteps Red Hat Resistance To Rival OpenStack Software Running On Its Dominant Linux, Red Hat Calls Foul
SUSE and Mirantis to collaborate on OpenStack
Remember that RHEL/Mirantis storm? SUSE helps to sidestep the issue
Mirantis and SUSE support multiple Linux OpenStack clouds

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Quelle: Mirantis