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Platform9 Enlists OpenStack To Create Hybrid Clouds with AWS
Platform9, a private cloud specialist, has released open source drivers that can be used with OpenStack to set up hybrid cloud implementations based on the Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) platform.
The company was founded in 2013, offering an OpenStack-based private cloud solution designed to run on any hardware and platform, with the goal of providing private-cloud benefits such as global visibility and control, self-service provisioning, and API-driven automation.
"Today, we announced the first-of-its-kind set of OpenStack drivers to control and manage resources on AWS," company exec Madhura Maskasky said in a blog post Wednesday. "The drivers provide the ability to integrate core OpenStack projects such as Nova, Glance, Neutron and Cinder with AWS and provide a seamless experience managing an AWS endpoint using OpenStack. Our goal is for this to become a community-driven initiative to help contribute support for other popular public clouds in the future."
Maskasky noted that OpenStack was created to overcome vendor lock-in found in technology stacks such as VMware -- lock-in that now appears in the public cloud space. "If an organization does not implement their cloud strategy well, they may be doomed by massive operational costs owed to AWS (or their favorite public cloud vendor), due to lock-in," she said.
A solution is to extend OpenStack's standardization and cost-reduction benefits beyond the private cloud space, transforming OpenStack into a hybrid cloud layer where an open API standard can be used for managing both private and public clouds.
This benefits IT departments by giving them one standard to deploy and govern against, along with other advantages, while developers can concentrate on developing against just one API.
The new drivers are hosted on GitHub under a project titled OpenStack-Omni. Its description reads: "OpenStack-Omni aims to provide a standard OpenStack API for managing hybrid and multi-cloud environments. This repository contains OpenStack drivers for various public cloud environments. These drivers currently provide the capability to spin up OpenStack instances, images, volumes and networks on Amazon EC2. We need contributions to support other public cloud environments like Azure, Google Compute Engine, Rackspace, etc. Following OpenStack projects are supported -- Nova, Neutron, Cinder Glance."
Furthermore, the project description says, it's currently under development, available now for individual testing.
"Our goal is to contribute this to OpenStack and include these drivers among the core OpenStack drivers that ship out-of-the-box," Maskasky said.
Related launchpad blueprints are available for Neutron, Glance, Nova and Cinder.
Those OpenStack components deal with networking, images, compute and block storage, respectively.
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.