As we celebrated OpenStack’s third birthday over the summer, the Cloudscaling team was also putting the final touches to OCS 2.5. Today, we are happy and proud to announce general availability of OCS 2.5.
The most advanced OpenStack-powered cloud infrastructure software just got better.
When we announced OCS 2.5 at the OpenStack Summit in Portland, we had a clear idea of what we wanted to accomplish with the release:
Broaden and deepen our OpenStack support
Double down on AWS compatibility
Unlike some of our competitors who are still building cloud software using OpenStack Folsom or earlier, we feel customers benefit most when we built OCS using the latest stable OpenStack release. So OCS 2.5 is built with Grizzly (specifically OpenStack 2013.1.2).
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And we didn’t cherry pick which OpenStack core and integrated projects to tackle – we took the whole lot: Ceilometer, Cinder, Glance, Horizon, Keystone, Neutron (for VPC), Nova and Swift are all installed as part of OCS. Don’t worry, we haven’t forgotten about Heat – we’ll be using it initially to streamline our development efforts and then roll it into OCS in the future. Short of building your own OpenStack cloud from scratch, no other product option has this depth and currency of OpenStack integration in the marketplace. And with OCS, customers get the benefit of an integrated solution, not just a box of parts. They’re a part of a community of OCS users, not left on their own to maintain a one-off cloud.
The success of AWS and its impact on the datacenter is hard to ignore – if you haven’t already noticed, we are big fans of AWS. But that isn’t the only reason. We run into a lot of companies that are looking to implement a hybrid cloud strategy. The reasons vary from being financially driven to those around control and compliance. But a few things are constant – they “grew up” on AWS, their IT toolkit and deployment methodology is heavily influenced by AWS and their applications are dependent on AWS services. There is zero desire to start anew on any of these fronts.
To provide a solution that addresses this need, a private cloud system must provide AWS compatible building blocks and functionality. At the most basic level, this is what we mean and what we are delivering in OCS 2.5:
Finally, we learned a lot during our journey to bring OCS 2.5 to market. We will share those learnings via the Simplicity Scales blog through the rest of the year.
Momentum Is Addictive
The first eight months of 2013 have been great for Cloudscaling because we have been firing on all cylinders. Highlights include
But we are not even close to being done. In the last week alone, we put up a ton of datasheets and white papers on our website’s Resources page to assist you to learn more about OCS. In addition, we also kicked off our Fall Webinar series, with the first one on September 12 with our friends at Cumulogic.
Plus, we will have more news the next few weeks – customer deployments and success stories, opportunities to interact with OCS in a live, production environment, and upstream code contributions to OpenStack.
Game On!
