Rishidot research briefing notes Cloudscaling
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Cloudscaling, founded by Randy Bias, offers the Open Cloud System (OCS) 2.0, which is designed for enterprises to build elastic infrastructure using OpenStack technology. The product enables organizations to deploy private cloud solutions while maintaining control over their infrastructure, making it suitable for modern applications. However, its reliance on the OpenStack ecosystem and limited appeal to enterprises with legacy systems present challenges for their market position.
Rishidot research briefing notes Cloudscaling
- 1. Cloudscaling A Briefing Note By Krishnan Subramanian Cloudscaling A Briefing Note by Krishnan Subramanian Company: Cloudscaling (www.cloudscaling.com) Market: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Products: Open Cloud System (OCS) Summary: Cloudscaling is one of the vendors in the OpenStack ecosystem focusing on building infrastructure for web scale applications. Their core product is Open Cloud System, which is in Version 2.0 now. OCS is suitable for organizations wanting to build elastic infrastructure like public clouds inside their own datacenter. OCS core is based on OpenStack with some additional add-‐ons offered by Cloudscaling to optimize the OpenStack platform for production level infrastructure.
- 2. Cloudscaling A Briefing Note By Krishnan Subramanian Market Overview The cloud infrastructure market is divided into two segments, public clouds and private clouds. At present, public cloud use is mostly driven by startups and other SMBs while enterprises are slowly starting to embrace the public clouds for their non-‐mission critical needs. Even though some organizations are using public clouds for their mission critical workloads, most of the enterprise usage is restricted to customer facing web applications. However, enterprises see the benefits of public clouds and use private clouds as a way to achieve some of the benefits like agility, cost savings, etc. inside their organization. They also use the hybrid approach for certain use cases where the spike in the load is short term and investments in additional capacity are unnecessary (Cloudbursting). According to our internal estimates, private and hybrid clouds are going to dominate the enterprise market for the next 3-‐5 years while public clouds slowly make inroads into the enterprises. This changes the dynamics of infrastructure market and opens up the market for cloud infrastructure platforms. After staying quiet for many years, telecom companies are slowly waking up to the reality of public clouds and the value they can offer in the cloud market. Telecoms, along with other traditional hosting service providers, are going to greatly increase the market size of cloud infrastructure platforms, making this one of the fastest growing segments in the coming years. This market segment is divided into proprietary and open source software. Some of the leading cloud infrastructure platforms include: • OpenStack • CloudStack • Eucalyptus • vCloud Suite • Nimbula • Hexagrid • Joyent SmartOS • 3Tera • Flexiant • Microsoft CloudOS There are few other proprietary and open source platforms available in the market. We have listed the important cloud infrastructure platforms as per our analysis of the market. Cloudscaling Overview Cloudscaling was founded by Randy Bias, one of the thought leaders in the cloud computing space and former CTO of GoGrid. The company started off as a systems integrator building cloud infrastructure for telcos but slowly transformed themselves as a company offering cloud infrastructure solutions based on OpenStack software. Their core focus is in building reliable, scalable, production grade cloud infrastructure for enterprises and service providers.
- 3. Cloudscaling A Briefing Note By Krishnan Subramanian Taking advantage of the reluctance of enterprises to relinquish the control they have on their infrastructure, Cloudscaling’s Open Cloud System (OCS) offers the same benefits of public clouds and can be deployed inside the enterprise datacenters with the full control of IT. Currently in Version 2.0, OCS uses certified hardware components along with the reference architecture developed by Cloudscaling team based on their experience building web scale elastic clouds at telecom providers like Korean Telecom and service providers like Internap. OCS also includes certain production grade features offering improved reliability, performance and security that are not part of the core OpenStack trunk. In addition, OCS includes support for Amazon EC2 and Google Compute Engine APIs, thereby, making federation/bursting into these public cloud services completely seamless. OCS 2.0 offers support for AWS EBS like block storage and support for OpenStack Folsom. OCS 2.0 also supports advanced networking capabilities including scale-‐out networking and cloud topology management. Cloudscaling has customers ranging from enterprises to telcos to large service providers to modern organizations focused on consumer facing web scale applications. Even though they are built on free and open source OpenStack software, their monetization strategy is two-‐fold: • Annual support and maintenance for Open Cloud System based on per physical CPU and terabyte. They have two support levels, base level and production level • Commercially licensed production grade add-‐ons for OpenStack with support part of the licensing fee Let us briefly discuss the pros and cons of Cloudscaling’s OCS: Advantages -‐ Web scale elastic clouds ready for production environment. One of the few players in the OpenStack ecosystem to offer production grade deployment of OpenStack with fast support for newer versions of the software -‐ Built on top of open source software without any need for expensive specialized hardware. Use of commodity hardware and networking makes the solution cost effective -‐ Built for modern dynamical distributed applications -‐ Suitable for both enterprises and service providers Disadvantages -‐ Dependence on fragile OpenStack ecosystem. A fork in the community has the potential to impact their business -‐ Enterprises heavily reliant on legacy software will find their solution to be of little use Competitors Cloudscaling faces competition from many different market segments including: Ø Public cloud services like Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Engine, Rackspace, etc. including many startups in the infrastructure as a service space. As enterprises get comfortable with public cloud services, their need for a solution like Cloudscaling decreases
- 4. Cloudscaling A Briefing Note By Krishnan Subramanian Ø Proprietary cloud platforms like vCloud, Nimbula, etc. and open source cloud platforms like Eucalyptus, CloudStack, etc. combined with professional services offered by the vendors behind the product/projects or other system integrators Ø Other vendors in the OpenStack ecosystem including companies like Piston Cloud, Rackspace Private Cloud, Nebula, Redhat, SuSe, and system integrators like Mirantis, etc. Summary Cloudscaling Open Cloud System is well suited for enterprises wanting to set up elastic infrastructure for their modern distributed applications and service providers who want to offer public cloud services like Amazon Web Services and Google Compute Engine. However, it is ill-‐suited for enterprises having large legacy application baggage. OCS 2.0 is production ready solution on commodity hardware and uses open protocols.