FOSS Project Spotlight: OpenNebula

Michael Abdou — Thu, 13 Jun 2019 12:00:00 +0000

OpenNebula recently released its latest version, 5.8 "Edge", which now offers pivotal capabilities to allow users to extend their cloud infrastructure to the Edge easily and effectively.

Why OpenNebula?

For anyone looking for an open-source, enterprise solution to orchestrate data-center virtualization and cloud management with ease and flexibility, OpenNebula is a fine candidate that includes:

On-demand provisioning of virtual data centers.
Features like capacity management, resource optimization, high availability and business continuity.
The ability to create a multi-tenant cloud layer on various types of newly built or existing infrastructure management solutions (such as VMware vCenter).
The flexibility to create federated clouds across disparate geographies, as well as hybrid cloud solutions integrating with public cloud providers like AWS and Microsoft Azure.

And, it's lightweight, easy to install, infrastructure-agnostic and thoroughly extensible.

Figure 1. High-Level Features

Check here for a more detailed look at OpenNebula features.

New Features in 5.8 "Edge"

With the current conversation shifting away from centralized cloud infrastructure and refocusing toward bringing the computing power closer to the users in a concerted effort to reduce latency, OpenNebula's 5.8 "Edge" release is a direct response to the evolving computing and infrastructure needs, and it offers fresh capabilities to extend one's cloud functionality to the edge. Gaming companies, among others, who have been using OpenNebula were of the first to push for these features (yet they don't have the be the only ones to benefit from them).

LXD Container Support

In addition to supporting KVM hypervisors, as well as offering a cloud management platform for VMware vCenter server components, OpenNebula now provides native support for LXD containers as well. The virtues offered by LXD container support allow users and organizations to benefit from:

A smaller space footprint and smaller memory.
Lack of virtualized hardware.
Faster workloads.
Faster deployment times.

From a compatibility perspective, OpenNebula 5.8 and LXD provide the following:

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Linux's Broadening Foundation

Doc Searls — Thu, 06 Jun 2019 11:30:00 +0000

by Doc Searls

It's time to embrace 5G, starting with the Edge in our homes and hands.

In June 1997, David Isenberg, then of AT&T Labs Research, wrote a landmark paper titled "Rise of the Stupid Network". You can still find it here. The paper argued against phone companies' intent to make their own systems smarter. He said the internet, which already was subsuming all the world's phone and cable TV company networks, was succeeding not by being smart, but by being stupid. By that, he meant the internet "was built for intelligence at the end-user's device, not in the network".

In a stupid network, he wrote, "the data is boss, bits are essentially free, and there is no assumption that the data is of a single data rate or data type." That approach worked because the internet's base protocol, TCP/IP, was as general-purpose as can be. It supported every possible use by not caring about any particular use or purpose. That meant it didn't care about data rates or types, billing or other selfish concerns of the smaller specialized networks it harnessed. Instead, the internet's only concern was connecting end points for any of those end points' purposes, over any intermediary networks, including all those specialized ones, without prejudice. That lack of prejudice is what we later called neutrality.

The academic term for the internet's content- and purpose-neutral design is end-to-end. That design was informed by "End-to-End Arguments in System Design", a paper by Jerome Saltzer, David P. Reed and David D. Clark, published in 1980. In 2003, David Weinberger and I later cited both papers in "World of Ends: What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else". In it, we explained:

When Craig Burton describes the Net's stupid architecture as a hollow sphere comprised entirely of ends, he's painting a picture that gets at what's most remarkable about the Internet's architecture: Take the value out of the center and you enable an insane flowering of value among the connected end points. Because, of course, when every end is connected, each to each and each to all, the ends aren't endpoints at all.

And what do we ends do? Anything that can be done by anyone who wants to move bits around.

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