Hi all,
I was recently watching the OpenStack keynote by Mark Shuttleworth over the weekend (link here) and he spoke about and demonstrated some of the new tech and solutions that Canonical (i.e. Ubuntu) have developed with regards to Cloud and OpenStack (cloud management framework).
The main topics that I thought were very interesting are:
MAAS – https://maas.ubuntu.com/ – Metal as a Service (MAAS) is their offering for scale out computing at a hardware level. Its essentially EC2, but with your own physical devices being managed by the MAAS software. This allows you to scale out as the softwares demands increase (this will play very nicely with HP moonshot servers running ARM CPU’s, low cost, high commodity, high volume servers).
Juju – https://juju.ubuntu.com/ – Juju is a new software that basically allows you to build an application via a GUI using juju “charms”, where a charm is Hadoop, WordPress, MongoDB, etc. The juju console then shows you what you need to configure to get it all working (a sort of interoperability settings bar), and then once your happy you can click “deploy” and it does the rest for you. Very slick! The main intention of this is to remove the “TTV” (Time to value) for app developers, so in the case your software runs upon Hadoop/Mongo/etc you dont have to read the O’Reilly book cover to cover to know how to deploy it, if there is a charm for it then you can “use” it without knowing it extensively (raised a lot of questions in my mind about “In the future, will people actually know the software they use?” similar to how the older generation often moan we 20 somethings dont know how to code in machine code or ASCII 🙂 ).
Landscape – http://www.ubuntu.com/management – This is the Canonical offering to Enterprises, and is a system that allows very granular control of your Ubuntu server estate (rolling out updates, etc) but it also allows aggregate views in a dashboard for performance data, i.e. an admin can login to their ‘landscape’ system and see the overall CPU usage of their cloud of 1000 servers, or the overall storage use, etc. While this is Ubuntu only (similar to Red Hat Satellite?) it could potentially get very interesting if they branch out to other OS’s using puppet, or something similar.
SDN Integration – A side note, Ubuntu 13.04 (released a few months ago) also comes with SDN capabilities “out of the box”, supporting Big Switch Networks (VC funded SDN company) and Nicira (Software defined storage, bought by VMware) via their OpenStack implementation. Using this with MAAS, Landscape and Juju via an Openstack controller, you can imagine that Ubuntu are positioning themselves as the one stop shop to go to for a wholly controlled and managed Ubuntu estate, that can also own the network, manage the devices and scale out as needed based upon your Juju deployed applications.
Lots of cool things going on!
Sam
