Canadian Web Hosting Prepares OpenStack Cloud Release

This blog article is the first of several introducing the Openstack Cloud Software platform and it’s capabilities for customers looking for an enterprise grade cloud platform.  In the months ahead Canadian Web Hosting will be releasing an updated CA Cloud powered by OpenStack. With this, our customers will have immediate access to a repeatable, reliable and massively scalable cloud service where customers can create, or move existing cloud workloads (including AWS) without vendor lock in.  More importantly, customers have the ability for the first time to fully maintain control of where and how their data is stored and benefit from Canada’s rigorous security and privacy regulations.  Once deployed the CA Cloud will deliver the first OpenStack Cloud platform that is 100% Canadian-owned and –operated.

So, what is OpenStack? At a high level, it is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform built entirely of Open Source technologies.  Listed below, are some high level descriptions of some of the key components within OpenStack as well as some of the tools and technologies that are supposed.

Canadian Web Hosting recently attended the OpenStack Summit in Portland, Oregon where the OpenStack community introduced its seventh major release of the cloud software named “Grizzly.”  This new release added enhanced the software and brought almost 230 new features to the various aspects of the platform, including changes to the core OpenStack Compute (also known as Nova) components where support was added for managing distributed clusters as "Cells" and a new "NoDB" architecture that significantly reduces reliance on any type of centralized database.   Because many companies and enterprises are using “proprietary technologies, OpenStack deftly added support for technologies ESX, KVM, Xen and Hyper-V hypervisors, which Canadian Web Hosting is offering and supporting our customers today.   This will greatly increase the adoption rate and make it easier for enterprises and service providers like Canadian Web Hosting to remove vendor lock in and add services based on need rather than a specific technology.  You also have new functionality for almost instant bare metal provisioning of nodes, protocols for shared storage, and hot add/remove support for network devices.  So, let’s look at some of the specific features within the OpenStack Cloud platform.

There are two different types of storage available within OpenStack – Object Storage and Block Storage.  With “Swift,” the Object Storage component of OpenStack now let’s us apply a specific quota to control the expansion of object storage and lets us streamline operations by performing bulk operations over large/many clusters.   To achieve this, cross-origin resource sharing has been added to allow browsers to directly connect to resources in the storage cloud and improve the scalability of web applications which use the object storage as a content resource. Alternatively to Swift, “Cinder” or Block Storage technology, has acquired an intelligent scheduler to manage storage allocation based on workload and has added drivers for backend storage including Cep/RBDh, EMC, HP, IBM, NetApp, and even Red Hat's Gluster.

On the networking side, “Quantum” has seen its significant enhancements and has increased supported technologies grow from technologies like Open vSwitch, Cisco UCS/Nexus, Linux Bridge, Nicira, Ryu OpenFlow and NEC OpenFlow to now also include Big Switch, Hyper-V, Brocade and Midonet.  Improvements in scalability have been achieved by utilizing a more dynamic approach to sacal and distributing L3, L4 and DHCP across multiple servers.  One of my favorites is the addition of a new framework and API for Load Balancing as a Service (LBaaS), which has been included to allow further development on this theme.   There has been some significant growth in networking and you now have many of the leading networking companies building code and looking to implement enhancements including within Software Defined Networking (SDN).

Within the "Horizon" dashboard, there is increased flexibility and customers will see better multilingual support with many subtle user improvements.  You also have features like networking and the above mentioned Load Balancing as a Service features, now surfaced on the cloud.   With any cloud service focused on the enterprise, authentication and security will continue to be a top priority.  “Keystone” OpenStacks Identity technology has adopted a new token format, which has improved performance and no longer requires tokens to be authenticated online only.  There are also been significant improvements multi-tenant support for groups, impersonation, role-based access, and more delegation capabilities so administrators have greater control over their services and users.

Over the weeks ahead, we will continue to dive into the technology and provide back ground on Canadian Web Hosting’s deployment of OpenStack and the significant advantages it gives our customers.   We will also be announcing our participation in the OpenStack Foundation and some really great initiatives we are implementing with our customers to help build the community and foster Canadian principles as the OpenStack platform continues to grow.  For more information on Canadian Web Hosting is doing with OpenStack, or to participate in our beta program, email us at sales@canadianwebhosting.com.