OpenStack Israel Podcast, Episode 12

Shlomo Swidler's OpenStack Israel Podcast

This podcast series explores topics of interest to OpenStack practitioners, focusing on the ecosystem in Israel.

In this episode I speak with Dagan Gilat, Senior Manager of Cloud Platforms at IBM Haifa Research Lab.

Highlights from the podcast:

• The major areas of focus of the IBM Haifa Research Center.

• How cloud computing workloads have changed over the years.

• As workloads need to bridge the gap across from traditional style to cloud style architectures, OpenStack becomes more interesting….

• IBM’s initial contributions to OpenStack were in the areas of enabling IBM storage products, and maintaining HA despite certain kinds of hardware failures. Later contributions include the areas of resource management and VM placement, storage – Swift and Cinder – including secure multitenancy, on-demand data migration, and networking contributions.

• Interesting lesson from the OpenStack Summit in Altanta last week: OpenStack is a mature system that can handle a fairly complex and heterogeneous environment that includes many types of computational abstracts – containers, vms, bare metal servers – and many types of hypervisors.

• The initial challenge with OpenStack was in climbing the learning curve. It was difficult to bring up the environment, networking configuration was complex, automation tools were lacking. These areas have improved, and several alternatives are available – so the challenge today is to choose a solution wisely. The key to choosing is to evaluate the options carefully, with the help of an experienced partner.

• Most companies will choose a distribution instead of adopting the vanilla OpenStack project.

• The main obstacle facing OpenStack today is its complexity. Each subproject within OpenStack will succeed or fail based on the quality of its technical leadership.

• From IBM’s experience in keeping large clusters of OpenStack up and running, it’s important to ensure you only upgrade to stable versions, and it’s equally important to ensure that, like the technology, your operational processes are mature.

Shlomo Swidler’s OpenStackIL Podcast Episode 12: Dagan Gilat of IBM

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