Hi, I 'm planning to rent a very powerful dedicated server and run OpenStack on top of it for ...

[G+_Volkan Paksoy]

Hi,

 

I'm planning to rent a very powerful dedicated server and run OpenStack on top of it for mostly educational purposes to run mostly test machines. The idea is to be able to run a bunch of small machines that are available online and can be manipulated by OpenStack API (maybe I can develop my own tools using the API).

 

Do you think it's a good investment of time/money/effort? Maintenance might be a hassle as opposed doing the same thing using AWS or Azure but it will be mostly for expendible machines and I'm really curious to learn OpenStack.

 

also do you think OpenStack is worth it or would you recommend other alternatives? Even though it's open source and supported by a bunch of companies it looks like Rackspace's baby primarily and none of the leading cloud providers (Amazon, Microsoft, Google) use it.

 

I know it sounds more like a TWiET question but I believe cloud computing is popular among KH-crowd as well. 

 

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

 

Thanks in advance.

[G+_Brad Whitfield]

Really depends on what you want to do educationally. Is this to teach people infrastructure, or to spin up VM's for use with projects, or playing with Object Storage?

 

Red Hat actually writes more code for Open Stack than any other company. They are hugely pushing the Open Cloud. If you wanted to just try OpenStack quickly, you can use Fedora and PackStack. Basically you just answer some prompts and let it do all the dirty work (still have to know some basics, though). Then you could have a live version of OpenStack and see if it meets your needs.

[G+_Volkan Paksoy]

Thanks for the response, Brad. To clarify, by educational purposes I just meant me practising more about cloud computing and OpenStack. 

 

I installed DevStack on a local VM and started playing with it. I hadn't heard about PackStack but I'll definitely have a look. thanks for the tip.

[G+_Brad Whitfield]

Just to check out cloud computing in general, OpenStack would be great, but as you said, the maintenance is a bit much right now. The support cycles will eventually get longer, I'm sure, but for now, to stay current, you would be updating every 6 months, I think it is. In it's current version, OpenStack pretty much on par with VMware.

 

DevStack is cool, but it was a pain in the neck for me to setup, honestly. I had to spend time modifying the script to get it to work, and I couldn't get it to work twice. PackStack is about a year old, and it's a Red Hat supported package, and so far, I've had good luck playing with it.

[G+_Travis Hershberger]

I'm gonna have to spin up a vm to play with packstack myself now.