On my last post, I mentioned that it’s getting more important having a solid open source private cloud solution. Without a doubt OpenStack is getting very good traction from the community, which is a good thing. As it turns out, for WSO2 Stratos (open source middleware platform as a service for enterprise) a private cloud is a very important part. Specially when most popular public cloud offering, Amazon EC2 is having so many issues.
In WSO2 data center, we run the entire platform on UEC which ships Eucalyptus and we haven’t seen any of the problems we faced with EC2. Ok, private cloud – very important.
As a platform as a service, it’s important to be able to run on top of many IaaS vendors. Same goes for private cloud solutions. So, if Stratos is to be run on OpenStack the auto scaling code should be working. Stratos auto scales on Amazon EC2 that’s the API that’s been implemented. It’s always a pain to support a different API. OpenStack is said to have an EC2 SOAP API but I couldn’t find the extent to which operations are supported. I’ll definitely have a definitive answer if I contact one of the devs. This post however was not about that.
Mark Shuttleworth wrote an excellent blog about some concerns over OpenStack. As Mark correctly observes, it’s not the right thing to innovate at the API level. As eternal perfectionists it’s very easy to get into having cleaner and powerful APIs. Then again from a pragmatic perspective it’s energy that’s better put into where it matters.
WSO2 Stratos already have a working implementation that is tested. Effort of implementing and testing for another API is going to be time consuming. Whether it’s a bad or a good API when we have to get it running we’ll implement it nevertheless.
There are many concerns that needs more attention than having a good API. Higher IO and network throughput comes to the top of the list ‘cos that’s what it matters from a user’s perspective. It’s great that people debating this issue and looking to make a difference!