back to article So you want to roll your own cloud

I have set myself a mission to create a cloud this year. Not a lab test version of something or other, but a real and usable cloud that I can sell to my clients. It's not built yet, but I intend to document my journey towards that end. The first question I get when discussing this project is always "why do you want to build a …

  1. Jon Massey
    FAIL

    Seems dodgy

    Check out the demo video on their website https://youtu.be/TIxJHDdcHnw?list=UUBwSqQJQ520NYoy2QlcYJKA&t=105 - the guy's "Downloads" folder is full of pirated music and warez!

    1. Trevor_Pott Gold badge

      Re: Seems dodgy

      Open source. No real money for marketing, what ya going to do? ;)

      That said, the VM provided seems fine. I've been poking at it for about a week now, and I can't see anything compromising about it. It just seems like someone packaged up OpenNebula on top of CentOS 7 and did the standard customizations so that when you deploy from OVA it doesn't do silly things like have its networking explode.

      Having tried to install OpenNebula from scratch onto CentOS myself, I have to say I appreciate the packaging. OpenNebula isn't the easiest thing to get up and running the way it should be.

      That said, I do think I might actually know someone who knows someone who is part of the vOneCloud team. Worth pointing it out to them. ;)

  2. CAPS LOCK

    "print money"

    Haha, yes, no-one ever lost money going toe-to-toe with Microsoft or AWS.

    1. Trevor_Pott Gold badge

      Re: "print money"

      Who needs to go toe to toe? They want to make billions. I'm happy carving out a few hundred thousand a year. An irrelevance to them, but the ability to copy my customers' data onto a hard drive and drive it down the road to them when things go phut is something that actually matters to some folks.

      I don't want the whole pie, mate. Just a nice, comfortable niche. :)

      1. Kiwi
        Boffin

        Re: "print money"

        but the ability to copy my customers' data onto a hard drive and drive it down the road to them when things go phut is something that actually matters to some folks.

        Here there could be a problem. I understand how cool it would be, and the great level of customer service as well, when you can deliver a copy of their data in way faster than download speeds.

        But..

        What about encrypting their data and making it tough to get it for anyone other than them?

        I personally would handle that by having it encrypted as much as possible so only someone with their credentials could access the data, and have a relevant clause/checkbox in the T&C to state that under such circumstances they could pass these details to you. Log in from a local box on a decent bit of LAN and you could copy off their data.

        CYA - Dotcom partly got in the crap because his "cloud storage service" didn't encrypt the data, and he could see what his customers were doing.

        Thanks for the headsup. I run OwnCloud for myself but have been thinking of trying something else.

  3. Geronimo!

    Been there, done that ... Got ProxMox

    I spent the best part of 18 Months, testing OpenStack, CloudStack, Xen, VMware, oVirt etc.

    And ended up using ProxMox.

    KVM and LXC, Setup in under 30 Minutes.

    Commodity Hardware, CEPH, DRBD, Gluster, standard iSCSI, NFS: It's all there.

    Rules, User Groups, Users ... So yes, I can give my customer his own piece of Cloud.

    The only piece missing would be billing.

    But hey, I see the traffic, I see the size of VMs.

    For now, I do the maths myself.

    1. Trevor_Pott Gold badge

      Re: Been there, done that ... Got ProxMox

      IIRC, ProxMox doesn't do full SDDC-style isolation. That said, it's been a couple of years since I really dug into it, it's probably worth looking at again.

      Not having the billing piece might be a bit of a killer though...

      1. DonL

        Re: Been there, done that ... Got ProxMox

        One thing I always notice when comparing cloud offerings is that the companies using VMware (for example) instead of open source are pricing themselves out of the market. The turnkey/ease-of-use part of the solution comes at a huge cost. And it seems that the really big ones are able to negotiate deals that are impossible to achieve for smaller parties.

        I've also compared offerings before and from a price/functionality/ease-of-use standpoint Proxmox seems to be ideal.

        And there seems to be at least one company offering billing functionality (I just googled quickly):

        https://hostbillapp.com/features/apps/proxmox.html

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Linux

      Re: Been there, done that ... Got ProxMox

      "And ended up using ProxMox."

      Hand crafting everything is my idea of fun (my PCs run Gentoo) but TP did say he wanted no part in a nerdgasm.

      Downloading vOneCloud now ...

      1. Trevor_Pott Gold badge

        Re: Been there, done that ... Got ProxMox

        If I weld it together out of hope and BBQed unicorns, how do my business partners continue the solution after I've been whacked by the tiny handed fuhrer's jackbooted Twitter gestapo?

        1. Chemical Bob
          Joke

          Re: Been there, done that ... Got ProxMox

          Most people worry about the wrong things. You'd probably get whacked by the angry unicorn moms of the unicorns you barbecued.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Been there, done that ... Got ProxMox

          that's one reason not to do this here. I have a couple of HP 12-core servers but, given I'm terminal, it's not a situation where I'd want to possibly leave customers in the lurch. Ever. It's one of the reasons I've always had great customer loyalty. [The other is that I never lie, nor do I have any trouble admitting I don't know something. Obviously, I'm insane.]

  4. Carlo Daffara

    A packaged opennebula, for vmware users

    I guess I am the guy Trevor mentioned in the comment up there :-)

    vOneCloud fulfills a very simple need- to add a simple and non-intrusive cloud-like layer on top of an existing vmware infrastructure, without having to resort to additional licensing, vCenters or vRealize components.

    It is based on the latest OpenNebula cloud platform, which you can consider a little like the EU alternative to OpenStack; it is one of the first open source cloud platforms, created in 2005 as a research platform by the DSA (Distributed Systems Architecture) Research Group at Complutense University of Madrid, released as open source in 2008, and used in several EU research projects on cloud computing. It does have quite a lot of users (my company among them, with a list here https://opennebula.org/users/featuredusers/ and some handle more than 300K cores) and features a reasonable amount of functionality in a very modular framework. It supports hybrid computing (on AWS & Azure), federation, virtual data centers, physical and logical partitioning and resource management, service management (with autoscaling), SDN, resource accounting and a whole lot of other things.

    It is very stable; maybe not so famous as OpenStack, but a very worthwhile project.

    So, vOneCloud is a simple packaging that adds OpenNebula as an orchestrator on top of an existing vmware infrastructure; it sits there and works - just that. Since it requires no changes to the infrastructure, it is very low touch, so you can try it and see if it fulfills your needs.

    As a partial response to previous comments, comparing OpenNebula with Proxmox is probably not right, as they are two different product categories - OpenNebula is more like OpenStack and Eucalyptus; they allow to scale to tens of datacenters or 10K nodes, which I believe that Proxmox does not do (no bashing of proxmox, as it's an excellent product in its own). If you want to add more "cloudity" to vmware, vOneCloud is IMHO one of the best tools out there. And it's open source- there are no hidden pieces. If you need support, you pay for it, like with RedHat or Suse.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Backup and restore?

    Just make sure backup and restore works (via actual testing!) before claiming the final winner.

    Plenty of "should work fine" backup solutions has turned out to mean "except for this one bug that only seems to affect us".

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Backup and restore?

      "Just make sure backup and restore works "

      Veeam 8)

    2. Trevor_Pott Gold badge

      Re: Backup and restore?

      Claiming a final winner will be quite the journey, I think. A lot of learning to do before I get there.

    3. fredesmite

      Re: Backup and restore?

      and upgrades ....

  6. Doogie Howser MD

    Nuvolat?

    I'm really not sure about the name. Sounds like something you rub on for a touch of lumbago!

  7. Andre 3

    Euro Versions

    Trevor

    I assume you can see the emails on comments. I'd be keen to discuss this with you further, as I am interested in doing the same thing in Europe

    1. Trevor_Pott Gold badge

      Re: Euro Versions

      I cannot see the e-mails on comments, but you can contact me directly through http://www.trevorpott.com

      1. Andre 3

        Re: Euro Versions

        Trevor - I have (re-e)mailed - hopefully it doesnt get caught in the spam filters this time!

  8. Adam 52 Silver badge

    I'm confused. You talk about taking on AWS and Azure, and yet your proposed offering is nothing like AWS and Azure.

    It sounds more like the plan is to take on DigitalOcean, Linode etc. at the razor-thin margin end of the business. A market in which Google is offering a loss leader for free and AWS are attempting to muscle in on with a price match model.

    1. Trevor_Pott Gold badge

      I intend to start with Backup as a Service and DR as a Service, but want to offer basic Infrastructure as a Service rather quickly. I also want a platform capable of delivering Platform as a Service as a vet and verify the templates for such.

      There is money to be made there in the simple fact that not everyone is going to put their information into the tiny, tiny hands of the USA. Beyond that, there is value in being a local provider. Someone who can take your data, shove it on a hard drive and drive it down to you after an outage event.

      I don't want to challenge Azure for every little thing, nor Amazon. It would be nice, but doing so is more expensive than it is remunerative. I just want to milk the most lucrative parts, and the ones where people are more likely to want to "buy local".

  9. Hans 1

    How about compliance, SLA ?

    There are specific rules you have to follow when it comes to hosting data for 3rdparties:

    http://www.computerweekly.com/podcast/Cloud-compliance-What-it-is-and-how-to-achieve-it

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    You got it all wrong!

    Dude you got it all wrong! Isn't about easy deployment, is about SLA and reability.

    If it is easy to implement but then fails when you start having lots of VMs, it is slow deploying images or the VMs themselves don't perform as expected. Or even worst, when it breaks you have no idea how to fix. Assuming you are a good VMware guy, these orchestration layers bring an all different complexity in top, quite often you can't do things like storage vmotion straight from VMware, or even put an host in maintenance mode. These softwares like to take full control of the stack, if you do it brute force way under the hood you risk to break the thing badly. Trust me on this, I did so many implementations of different clouds and the problem always come months after with limits that the developers themselves had no clue they existed, fundamental flaws on design that weren't visible before because they were never tested in a real scenario with customers making the dumbest things no one ever imagined... so very careful on this, you may end up in a PR nightmare if things go wrong and they often go, no mater size or resources. Even the big sharks all had outages with big impact in the last year. This said, best of lucks

    1. Trevor_Pott Gold badge

      Re: You got it all wrong!

      Completely disagree. If you have to tinker with the guts of something to make it work, the thing isn't worth running in the first place. If, however, you can get back up and running by taking workloads/data/config and reinjecting into a clean setup and be up and running in minutes, you're golden.

      Desired state configs with software that actually works is infinitely better than boosting one's own ego welding disparate pieces of shite together. I don't want to be indespensible, nor to make some other IT guy indespensible. I want a turnkey solution. And would ya look at that, they actually exist.

      If I ever get to the point where I need to start worrying about "scale" enough that I am breaking the solutions on the table, then I'm in the world where I can just turn to VCE or Microsoft and buy my clouds pre-canned at rack scale.

      Remember that different approaches make sense at different scales. Just because it's financially viable for Google to lock a bunch of PhDs in a room and have them reinvent the wheel every 18 months doesn't mean that's remotely rational for someone talking about setting up a two site solution in some colos.

      Beauty of small deployments? I can test it all at the scale I intend to use for the next few years before I deploy. We'll worry about bigger once there's enough revenue to hire dedicated full time nerds to babysit. And that's an increasingly long way off, as the turnkey stuff gets better and better.

  11. Mad Chaz

    RDO and tripleO

    Getting openstack setup is surprisingly easy now with the RDO project and the tripleO installer. If you have the hardware, using tripleO, you can have everything installed pretty much automatically, including a ceph storage cluster and everything else you need.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: RDO and tripleO

      Ive had a number of issues installing RDO on Cent7. Networking is weakest point. Removal didn't work either.

  12. gcarter

    Loving the writing style in this article, am pushing x10 lols and head nods in the first handful of paragraphs!

    I thought I could build an empire from my ikle self hosted wordpress blog several years ago... and then got fed up and went to work for a large faceless conglomerate!

  13. davel1982

    Branding

    Can you brand the vOneCloud portal with your own Company logo etc, rather than the "one" and OpenNebula logos?.....

    1. Trevor_Pott Gold badge

      Re: Branding

      Given that vOneCloud is just a "rebranded" OpenNebula with some of the install effort already done for you, I'm willing to bet that's in the manual somewhere. Most likely some thing you change in a .yaml file in /etc/ somewhere.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Branding

    Can you brand the vOneCloud portal with your own Company logo etc, rather than the "one" and OpenNebula logos?.....

  15. CheesyTheClown

    Why not buy your own cloud?

    Honestly, just buy an Azure Stack from Cisco, Dell (or if truly desperate HP) and be done with it. Then you have a finished platform with all the cloud services including PaaS and SaaS without the headache of either rolling your own or selling your soul to Amazon, Google or Microsoft.

    Yes, I know you'd be running Microsoft software... we already sold our souls to them for that.

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