OpenStack Summit: What Will be the LAMP of the Cloud?

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AUSTIN – In the early days of the Internet, it was the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack that enabled the rapid growth of the Web. For the new era of the cloud, what will be the LAMP stack of the cloud? That’s a question asked by Mark Collier, Chief Operating Officer of the OpenStack Foundation at the OpenStack Summit here.

Collier noted that growing demand for infrastructure is driving a need for a new stack. While OpenStack is part of the solution, it’s not necessarily the entire solution. Collier added that there are other tools and communities that OpenStack needs to embrace.

“The same way that users drove the LAMP stack to be more valuable than the sum of its parts, we have to listen to our users,” Collier said. “So if they can combine OpenStack with other things that’s a good thing.”

The biggest companies in the world world, including Walmart, AT&T and China Mobile, are now using OpenStack. Collier said that what those companies have realized is that they have to embrace open technologies to thrive. He added that all those large organizations are changing their culture and they are doing it because they have to in order to succeed and thrive. Collier said that companies today must collaborate or they will die.

Collier emphasized that if the largest companies in the world can collaborate, then OpenStack can collaborate too with other open-source efforts.

“The emerging stack will be OpenStack and a number other technologies ,” Collier said.

Collier brought executives from Time Warner Cable and LivePerson on stage to discuss how they are using OpenStack together with other technologies. Time Warner Cable is using Apache Mesos to help manage its OpenStack cloud efforts, while LivePerson is moving to a containerized architecture.

openstack

At the OpenStack Summit

Among the tools used by many organizations as part of a complete cloud deployment are Kubernetes and containers. Alex Polvi, the CEO of CoreOS, demonstrated how his firm is building a Kubernetes based tool that enables the containerized deployment of OpenStack. The CoreOS tool is a a fully containerized OpenStack running on top of Kubernetes. In a live demonstration, Polvi deployed an OpenStack service and also destroyed a service, in order to demonstrate self-healing capabilities.

“OpenStack is just an application, made up of some python code, and it’s subject to installation and lifecycle management like any other application,” Polvi said.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Datamation and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist