OpenStack Havana Broadens Cloud Options

OpenStack Havana supports the Docker container technology, which includes tools that enable administrators to easily move workloads around a system. Docker is backed by commercial vendor dotCloud and recently entered into a development partnership to support Red Hat-based Linux platforms.

“Docker is a portable application runtime that can … sometimes handle the underlying platform differences a little more smoothly than some of the other virtualisation environments,” Bryce explained.

Security Additions

With OpenStack Havana, a critical step forward is being made to secure the open-source cloud. For the first time, the project is including widespread support for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption for data transport.

As to why OpenStack is just now including SSL support, which is an industry standard used to support security, Bryce said it was a matter of timing and maturity.

“The focus was first on getting functionally running through unencrypted HTTP and not necessarily determining how to run it on SSL,” Bryce said. “Some people saw SSL as less of a priority as they were running on private networks that already had security measures in place.”

Going Forward

Although OpenStack has enjoyed great success in its brief three-year life, challenges still remain. Mark Collier, chief operating officer of the OpenStack Foundation, told eWEEK that education is a core focus to help continue growing OpenStack cloud deployments. One of the OpenStack Foundation’s education efforts got started in September, with the debut of a new OpenStack training marketplace.

“From the very beginning, we have based our community on sharing code and sharing knowledge,” Collier said. “As OpenStack adoption grows, it becomes increasingly important to share knowledge all the way to the end-user level.”

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Originally published on eWeek.