Emerging Players in the IaaS Market

Amazon has been the top dog in IaaS for a number of years, but the market is changing fast. It’s inevitable that emerging organizations and companies want a piece of the action. Open source options are emerging as very important in this market.

In this section, we provide an overview of the emerging players in both public and private cloud IaaS, including Eucalyptus, OpenStack, and Red Hat’s CloudForms.

Eucalyptus

Eucalyptus Systems is a software company intended to help customers accelerate their movement into a hybrid cloud environment. Therefore, it offers services to create a private cloud. To support public cloud services, Eucalyptus leverages Amazon’s Web Services APIs. The initial software behind the Eucalyptus solution was developed as open source at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Eucalyptus continues to support an open source community while at the same time offering an enterprise version of its software.

Through a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Eucalyptus has made itself particularly interesting for companies wanting to implement a hybrid cloud. Amazon partnered with Eucalyptus by providing the company with access to its AWS APIs. This means that an organization that develops a private cloud using Eucalyptus has built-in compatibility with AWS offerings. This allows companies to more easily create and move workloads between their private cloud and the public cloud. Eucalyptus faces stiff competition from other open source private cloud platform OpenStack, which is backed by a number of industry leaders.

OpenStack

OpenStack is implementing an open cloud platform aimed at either public or private clouds. The project was initiated jointly by Rackspace and NASA. While the organization is tightly managed by Rackspace, it moved to a separate OpenStack foundation. Although companies can leverage OpenStack to create proprietary implementations, to you, the OpenStack designation requires conformance to a standard implementation of services.

The initiative has begun gaining considerable support from customers and vendors. At this time, there are more than 150 vendors, including Dell, HP, Intel, AMD, and Cisco, who are using OpenStack as the foundation for their cloud offerings. In essence, OpenStack is an open source IaaS initiative built on Ubuntu, an operating system based on the Debian Linux distribution. It can also run on Red Hat’s version of the Linux operating system.

OpenStack’s goal is to provide a massively-scaled, multi-tenant cloud specification that can run on any hardware. OpenStack is building a large ecosystem of partners interested in adopting its cloud platform. One of the main goals of OpenStack is to provide an independent orchestration layer that supports all of the major hypervisors including VMware’s ESX and KVM, and Microsoft’s Hyper-V.

OpenStack’s services include

Nova: A compute service, this is the primary IaaS service. It’s written in the Python language.

Swift: This is an object storage service.

Glance: This image service provides a catalog and repository for virtual disk images. These disk images are mostly used in OpenStack Compute. Although this service is technically optional, any large cloud implementation will need this service.

Horizon: A dashboard service, this includes a web-based interface to support the OpenStack services.

Keystone: This is an identity service that provides authentication and authorization for OpenStack services including a service catalog.

Quantum: This networking service provides an abstracting of networking connectivity through interfaces.

Red Hat’s CloudForms

Red Hat, one of the most important open source Linux and infrastructure companies is expanding into cloud services. It created an open source IaaS to allow companies to build private or hybrid clouds with an open source initiative called CloudForms. The CloudForms environment uses Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise Middleware as a set of foundational services for its IaaS. CloudForms includes IaaS tools such as self-service provisioning, application management, configuration management, and deployment and management that allow services to move across environments. CloudForms also offers services to manage virtualization.