Building a free, massively scalable cloud computing platform
Soren Hansen at FOSDEM 2011:
A developer’s look into Openstack architecture
OpenStack is a very new, very popular cloud computing project, backed by Rackspace and NASA. It’s all free software (Apache Licensed) and is in production use already.
It’s written entirely in Python and uses Twisted, Eventlet, AMQP, SQLAlchemy, WSGI and many other high quality libraries and standards.
We’ll take a detailed look at the architecture and dive into some of the challenges we’ve faced building a platform that is supposed to handle millions of gigabytes of data and millions of virtual machines, and how we’ve dealt with them.
This presentation will be of interest to those who think the answer to topic map processing is to turn up the power dial.
That is one answer and it may be the best one under some circumstances.
That said, given the availability of cloud computing resources, the question becomes one of rolling your own or simply buying the necessary cycles.
Unless you are just trying to throw money at your IT department (that happens even in standards organizations), I suspect buying the cycles is the most cost effective option.
“Free” software really isn’t, particularly server class software, unless you have all volunteers administrators, donated hardware, backup facilities, etc.
Note that NASA, one of the sponsors of this project, can whistle up if not language authors, major contributors to any software package of interest to it. Can your organization say the same thing?
Just to be fair, my suspicions are in favor of a mix of algorithm development, innovative data structures and high end computing structures. (Yes, I know, I cheated and made three choices. Author’s choice.)
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