Deploy and manage OpenStack and AWS

AWS is the leader in the infrastructure-as-a-service public cloud market. On the other hand, OpenStack is the most solid cloud platform for private clouds. Although the number of AWS users far exceeds the number of OpenStack deployments, many enterprises are also considering building OpenStack clouds. For those companies, it's necessary to understand how to effectively deploy OpenStack and AWS in a hybrid cloud environment.

Both OpenStack and AWS provide scalable computing, storage and network services. There are also similarities between AWS services and OpenStack services. For example, both cloud providers offer object storage services; AWS has Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), and OpenStack has Swift. Likewise, OpenStack includes the Keystone service package for identity management, and AWS provides identity and access management as a service.

Despite similar features, tight integration between these two cloud platforms is not always easy. AWS proprietary APIs and native tools differentiate themselves by providing AWS-compatible APIs, such as cloud platforms like Eucalyptus, which Hewlett Packard Enterprise (then HP) acquired in 2014. OpenStack, on the other hand, took a different approach and developed its own API. The lack of native low-level compatibility between the two platforms means adopters have to adopt two broad strategies to support both.

Both OpenStack and AWS provide scalable computing, storage and network services. There are also similarities between AWS services and OpenStack services.

One approach is to use both OpenStack and AWS, but treat them as loosely coupled resources. This requires IT teams to run two clouds that are connected via AWS Direct Connect over the Internet or via dedicated lines between AWS and the data center. Using this strategy, enterprises can use OpenStack to run private clouds on-premises or in a hosted environment. Depending on the situation, resources can be deployed on either cloud. You can use AWS Storage Gateway to copy data between the two clouds.

Administrators can manually handle most other features of both platforms. For example, computing tasks can be moved between clouds by moving the infrastructure configuration files (such as Ansible scripts) that configure the servers. Some customization may be required in terms of configuration scripts, depending on which platform you are running on. For example, startup scripts that load web servers and install operating system updates can be run in AWS or OpenStack. But the scripts that reference the identity management service need to be customized.

The beauty of a loosely coupled approach is that enterprises can take advantage of the best parts of each cloud service. If your workloads are good candidates for a private OpenStack cloud and other workloads are good candidates for AWS, then you can deploy them to that preferred cloud. The disadvantage of this strategy, however, is that you may be duplicating efforts—having to install and maintain two different identity and access management systems, access control mechanisms, and governance policies and procedures.

Services like Cloudyn help simplify the work of managing each type of cloud. In addition to Microsoft Azure and Google Compute Cloud, its tools also provide optimization, analysis and governance functions for OpenStack cloud and AWS cloud. While Cloudyn may not be cross-cloud optimized, it does provide a single tool for managing multiple clouds.

Enterprises can also use a multi-cloud management layer such as Scalr or Dell Cloud Manager. These products provide a single platform for managing multiple clouds. The Scalr cloud management platform can support both governance methods and development and operation methods. Scalr includes many components to manage identity, policy, configuration, orchestration and billing in cloud environments. Common APIs are used to interact with resources across clouds. Dell Cloud Manager provides similar functionality to provision resources and automate tasks across clouds. Both Scalr and Dell Cloud Manager come in two flavors: software-as-a-service or on-premises.

Multi-cloud management tools provide an abstraction layer across different cloud platforms. With more common resources on each platform, such as virtual machines and object storage, cloud services can run more consistently. Using more specialized services, such as NoSQL databases that work on one platform but not another, eliminates the value of using a general platform.

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