OpenStack Powered
OpenStack Powered

At the OpenStack Summit taking place in Vancouver Canada, the two big announcements from day one are interoperability and federated identity. Both of these announcements should help reduce the concern that the explosion of OpenStack distributions is going to lead to vendor lock-in.

Interoperability essential for an ‘Open’ environment

The last eighteen months has seen an explosion in the number of vendors announcing their own OpenStack distributions. This led to a lot of concern last year that vendors were creating an environment where companies would find themselves locked-in to a single vendors OpenStack distribution. One of the triggers for this concern was the public spat between Mirantis and Red Hat over the problem of applying OpenStack patches to different OpenStack clouds.

Since then, the OpenStack Foundation has been keen to promote interoperability across all distributions of OpenStack. Now it has announced the “OpenStack Powered” marketing programme. It consists of three different licensing programmes sharing a single logo.

OpenStack Powered applies to the two latest versions of OpenStack with a set of required capabilities and the need to support key OpenStack features. The three programmes are:

  1. OpenStack Powered Platform: Must support Nova, Glance and Swift.
  2. OpenStack Powered Compute: Must support Nova and Glance.
  3. OpenStack Powered Object Storage: Must support Swift.

Vendors who want to use the OpenStack Powered logo must do their own testing and then submit their tests using an online form. This is a good move by the OpenStack Foundation as it looks to remove any risk of companies finding that they cannot move between different OpenStack distributions. It will also simplify life for vendors by making it much easier to interoperate with other OpenStack cloud environments.

The fifteen vendors that have already begun testing their products and are listed in the new OpenStack Marketplace are:

  • Blue Box Cloud
  • Bright Computing
  • DataCentred
  • HP
  • IBM
  • Internap
  • Mirantis
  • Rackspace
  • Red Hat
  • SUSE
  • SwiftStack
  • Ubuntu
  • UnitedStack
  • Vexxhost
  • VMware

Federated identity a major security boost for OpenStack clouds

The second announcement covers federated identity. Security teams have struggled to keep control of data and users as business units have purchased their own cloud environments. This has created a Shadow IT environment where users have to maintain multiple user identities and passwords.

What IT has been asking vendors for is the ability to adopt cloud services while retaining control of user identity through the use of federated identity solutions. Some vendors have offered their own solutions and others have provided access to APIs so that companies can write their own solutions. Ultimately, IT security has ended up running multiple security products that do not address all of the services users are accessing or are simple to deploy and audit.

32 companies have now announced that they will deliver federated identity across their private and public clouds in over 40 cities and 17 countries. This is a significant step forward for hybrid clouds and is likely to appeal to a lot of companies who are concerned about the ease with which security and control is slipping from their grasp.

The first group of companies that have announced federated identity include:

  • Anchor
  • Aptira
  • Auro
  • Blue Box Cloud
  • Breqwatr
  • Bright Computing
  • Cisco
  • City Network
  • Cloud and Heat
  • DataCentred
  • DreamHost
  • Dualtec
  • EasyStack
  • Elastx
  • Enter.it
  • HP
  • IBM
  • Internap
  • KIO Networks
  • Mirantis
  • Morphlabs
  • Oracle
  • Rackspace
  • Red Hat
  • Stratoscale
  • SUSE
  • TeutoStack
  • Transcirrus
  • Ubuntu
  • UnitedStack
  • Vexxhost

According to Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation: “OpenStack cloud providers are delivering on the promise of a global network of clouds that app developers can leverage depending on their needs.

“Today, the OpenStack community is putting app developers in the driver’s seat, giving them the power to choose the price, performance and geography that best suit the needs of their apps, matching workloads to the best resources. No other cloud platform promises what OpenStack can deliver.”

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