Advanced Computing in the Age of AI | Thursday, March 28, 2024

Rackspace Cuts Open vSwitch From Latest OpenStack Private Cloud 

Rackspace Hosting has built two versions of its eponymous Private Cloud, the version of OpenStack that includes hardware and software that it either runs in its own facilities or plunks into your own datacenter and operates remotely. After nine months of crafting the third iteration of the Rackspace Private Cloud, Rackspace is ready to ship, and there are some surprising changes.

The first big one is that Rackspace is pulling the open source Open vSwitch virtual switch from the stack and moving back to Linux Bridge and has replaced software-defined firewalls and load balancers with physical machines that do these jobs as they interface with the Neutron virtual networking plug-ins for OpenStack. This may be surprising, but Darrin Hanson, vice president of the private cloud unit at Rackspace, said that it was a necessary step to make OpenStack clouds more stable.

"We have over 100 customers who are running OpenStack who are running Rackspace Private Cloud in production and at scale, so this is not to knock out first products," explains Hanson. "But we did learn a lot about networking along the way, and a lot about Neutron and Open vSwitch specifically. While we think that we did a lot of elegant things in terms of software-defined networking and high availability, it just proved to not be ready for primetime. So we have replaced some of the underlying open source technologies, with more traditional and proven technologies. We believe this gives us a more robust platform."

The reason why this is important becomes obvious when you learn that with Rackspace Private Cloud 9.0 coming out today, Rackspace is offering a 99.99 percent uptime guarantee. (The "Icehouse" version of OpenStack is the ninth release of the open source cloud controller that is championed by Rackspace and others, and Rackspace is synchronizing its release numbers to OpenStack releases and therefore the private cloud version is not called Rackspace Private Cloud 3.0.) The uptime guarantee is not for all elements of the cloud, but is rather a guarantee that OpenStack APIs managed by the various controllers in the stack – Nova for compute, Swift for object storage, and so on – will be available 99.99 percent of the time. In addition to making the networking more stable, Rackspace has also rejiggered the way it manages these controllers to make them more resilient and scalable.

With the prior Rackspace Private Cloud, all of the Icehouse controllers were on two machines, and if you needed to scale beyond that, you basically had to create a whole new cloud and plunk it down next to it. Now, the base configuration comes with four nodes for these controllers. Three of them create a dataplane that allows for the controllers to scale independently and the fourth is used to offer an ElasticSearch across the controllers for querying them and a stash for logs coming out of the controllers. All of the controller services are now running inside of LXC Linux containers. So far, the scalability of this approach has been pushed up to 200 compute nodes, up from around 75 with the prior configuration.

With that uptime guarantee, now that the networking is more resilient and the controllers won't choke, Rackspace is committing that APIs will have less than four minutes of downtime per month. And if customers experience downtime, Rackspace will pay penalties of 5 percent of the value of the monthly bill they pay to Rackspace for every twenty minutes of downtime. Rackspace is also tossing in an enhanced version of its capacity planning and performance monitoring services to sweeten the private cloud deal.

As for the removed software-defined networking features, Hanson said that Rackspace is keeping a close eye on the projects and they will be cycled back in when they are hardened enough for production use.

Rackspace Private Cloud had around 20 customers a year ago and now has over 100 and is growing fast, says Hanson. As EnterpriseTech previously reported, Rackspace is no longer interested in being acquired and is doubling down on managed cloud services as its way forward. To that end, customers can pay for a dedicated OpenStack engineer to be added to their account for a supplemental fee. Generally speaking, one engineer usually manages between six and eight sets of OpenStack controllers and no more than that, says Hanson. So if you have a big cluster, the engineer is really dedicated to you, and if not, is shared by a few customers.

Rackspace Private Cloud costs $950 per node per month for infrastructure servers that host the OpenStack controllers plus $150 per node per month for compute or storage nodes in the cloud. The DevOps automation servers layered on top of the managed OpenStack cost $500 per node per month, with an additional account fee of $2,500 per month. Rackspace Private Cloud 9.0 is available in the United States now and will roll out in Rackspace's datacenters in Europe, Hong Kong, and Australia in early October.

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