18 OpenStack Cloud vendors complete community interop challenge

Competitors collaborate to make enterprise cloud computing environments interoperable for the first time.

8 years ago Posted in

IBM has published the results of the Interop Challenge, a cloud industry initiative aimed at demonstrating how OpenStack delivers on the promise of interoperability among vendors across on-premise, public and hybrid cloud deployments. The challenge was issued to OpenStack Foundation peers by Don Rippert, general manager for IBM Cloud Strategy, Business Development and Technology, at the OpenStack Summit in Austin in April 2016, and called for fellow cloud vendors to show proof of interoperability by the end of October.

To date, 18 major OpenStack vendors, including IBM, AT&T, Canonical, Cisco, Deutsche Telekom, DreamHost, Fujitsu, Huawei, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Intel, Linaro, Mirantis, OpenStack Innovation Center (OSIC), OVH, Rackspace, Red Hat, Suse and VMware, have come together to work through the challenge and achieve enterprise interoperability, deploying and successfully running OpenStack deployments across multiple clouds. Many of participants demonstrated this interoperability on stage at the OpenStack Summit in Barcelona today.

Since OpenStack was created in 2010, customers have been attracted to the innovation of the open source platform, as thousands of developers globally work together to develop the strongest, most robust and most secure cloud platform possible. Global community members and corporate industry leaders are committed to investing in the platform, contributing to its projects, improving the source code and improving the OpenStack deployment process and ongoing operational experience. It is ever evolving and ever improving. Customers are able to source different interrelated components of their cloud solutions from different vendors of their choice to create the combined environment that best meets their needs, but until now, the potential of OpenStack was limited by the lack of proof of interoperability among various OpenStack environments.

Through improved OpenStack cloud interoperability, customers are protected from vendor lock-in and able to easily uproot workloads and move them to new cloud providers if they choose. In addition, they benefit from the seamless interoperation among their chosen vendors, enabling them to better leverage hybrid OpenStack cloud environments and use whatever combination of cloud services best meets their requirements.

“What customers want from open source projects is innovation, integration and interoperability,” said Mr. Rippert. “Nobody has doubted the innovation and integration capabilities within the OpenStack projects, however some doubted whether the vendors supporting OpenStack would work together to achieve interoperability. Today with this significant milestone, we are proving to the world that cross-vendor OpenStack interoperability is a reality. When it comes to OpenStack, our hope is that this demonstration of working interoperability will reduce customer fears of vendor lock-in. We at IBM look forward to continued work with the community and fellow OpenStack vendors to continually improve interoperability to meet the goals of our customer base.”

The Interop Challenge uses deployment and execution of an enterprise workload with automated deployment tools, demonstrating the capabilities of OpenStack as a cloud infrastructure that supports enterprise applications.

This is not the first effort at interoperability within the OpenStack community, but it is the first to focus on workload portability. The Interop Challenge is therefore complementary to the ongoing work of the DefCore Committee and RefStack project, which focus on defining must-pass API tests and designated sections of code that must be present in OpenStack Powered (TM) products. Together, the two efforts help move the community toward a more interoperable future.

As part of the group’s success in working through and achieving portability between on-premise, public and hybrid OpenStack deployments, the 18 participants have also created automated tools for deployment of applications across a variety of OpenStack environments. They have additionally generated collateral on best practices, providing an interoperability roadmap for other OpenStack members in the future. Leveraging the collateral and best practices resulting from this challenge, the OpenStack Interop members will continue to collaborate across the community to drive further interoperability improvements for OpenStack going forward.

18 OpenStack Cloud vendors complete community interop challenge

Competitors collaborate to make enterprise cloud computing environments interoperable for the first time.

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