Canonical brings OpenStack to small-scale clouds
Canonical has announced the extension of its commercial OpenStack offering to small-scale cloud environments with a new project, Sunbeam.
The project is 100 percent open source and is available free-of-charge, but enterprise customers can also opt-in for comprehensive security coverage and full commercial support under the Ubuntu Pro + Support subscriptions once they’ve completed the deployment.
"Historically, commercial OpenStack deployments always used to come through paid consulting engagements and no vendor was an exception here," says Tytus Kurek, product manager at Canonical. "In line with our mission to amplify open source, we are committed to delivering a production-grade platform to the community that everyone could just deploy themselves. Sunbeam emerged to remove numerous barriers around the initial adoption of OpenStack and is just the first step towards an autonomous private cloud."
Sunbeam comes with a clear interface and very simple installation instructions, making it straightforward for everyone -- even those with no previous OpenStack experience. Lightweight architecture also makes Sunbeam usable on machines with limited hardware resources, including workstations and VMs, effectively eliminating the need to have dedicated hardware for testing purposes.
By running its services inside containers, OpenStack gets fully decoupled from the underlying operating system, making operations such as upgrades much easier. By using native Kubernetes principals, such as StatefulSets and operators, OpenStack can be modeled, deployed and managed as any other cloud-native application.
"More than 70 percent of OpenStack users also deploy Kubernetes, but Kubernetes is also increasingly used to manage OpenStack deployments themselves," says Thierry Carrez, general manager of the Open Infrastructure Foundation. "With more than 40m compute cores of OpenStack now in production worldwide, the introduction of Sunbeam opens an exciting new way of deploying and operating OpenStack, from small labs to global scale deployments. We’re excited about the accessibility Canonical has brought to both OpenStack and Kubernetes through Sunbeam, and we’re eager to show it off to the community at the OpenInfra Summit this week in Vancouver."
You can find out more on the Canonical site.
Image Credit: Wayne Williams