OpenStack Gets Open Source FUEL for Deployment

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How do Cisco, WebEx, PayPal and NASA deploy and manage OpenStack clouds? They all benefit from some FUEL.

FUEL is a library of OpenStack cloud management tools, assembled by integrator Mirantis. Mirantis is a leading OpenStack services vendor and recently raised $10 million in funding.

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Mirantis is now publicly releasing the FUEL library as an open source effort in a bid to help enterprises successfully manage and deploy OpenStack clouds at scale. Adrian Ionel, CEO of Mirantis, explained to Datamation that the FUEL library was developed by his company through its experience building OpenStack clouds.

Ionel isn’t aiming to position FUEL itself as an OpenStack distribution, in the same sense that Red Hat, Ubuntu or SUSE offer their own respective OpenStack distributions.

“Think about FUEL as an automation and management layer that fits around any OpenStack distribution,” Ionel said. “FUEL also works with the OpenStack trunk, so you don’t necessarily need to work with somebody elses OpenStack distro.”

The FUEL library includes over 40 components that are not part of the core OpenStack project, but play a key role in the large scale deployment scenarios. Among the projects is Galera, which is a multi-master replication cluster technology for MySQL. FUEL also includes HAproxy, which is a web load balancer. The FUEL library also includes Puppet for configuration management and Cobbler for bare metal provisioning.

Boris Renski, co-founder of Mirantis, explained that the FUEL, is the ultimate do it yourself kit, for large scale open stack adopters. The way a potential user interacts with FUEL is by way of a Mirantis portal, which provides open source binaries. In addition to the binaries, FUEL provides a detailed step-by-step guide that explains what an administrator needs to do with the binaries to deploy various configurations of OpenStack, ranging from simplistic single node deployments all the way to high-end deployments that are suited for deployments like PayPal.

Open Source

While FUEL itself is an open source effort, commercial support for FUEL-based OpenStack deployments is also a part of the Mirantis offering.

“Hopefully FUEL will offer tremendous value to customers that will download and install it for free and get some positive experiences and usage out of that,” Ionel said. “Above and beyond that, large enterprises will want to be supported and will want to have someone to call.”

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.