Oracle Infrastructure as a service announcement

Oracle is already securing its place in the cloud era for some time by providing a number of cloud based solutions as well as software and hardware which enables companies to build private (or hybrid) clouds within their own datacenters. One area however which has not been touched that much by Oracle is the Infrastructure as a Service area.

If you take a close look at the Oracle cloud strategy which has been forming in past couple of years and if you have been looking closely at the products in both hardware and software this should not come as a surprise to many. What you could seen is that Oracle has been working on a lot of solutions that are all part of a cloud / IaaS foundation. In recent years it has become clear that Oracle is using the public market as some sort of testing ground and have the product they put out in the market, end up up in the Oracle cloud solutions. Another giveaway could have been the fact that Oracle has started to embrace OpenStack which was a clear giveaway that IaaS was the way to go in the minds of the Oracle executives.

In the recent second quarter financials call from Oracle given by Larry Ellison the statement made was: "his company intends to be price competitive with established cloud infrastructure-as-a-service players like Amazon, Microsoft and Rackspace". Also stated by Larry was: "We intend to compete aggressively in the commodity infrastructure as a service marketplace". According to Oracle this should start unfolding in the first half year of 2014

This news, even though one could have expected it, will ensure that other IaaS competitors will have to start watching and battling Oracle in this field in which previously Oracle was not a player.

Deploying Ceph and OpenStack with Juju

A lot of people working on building private or public clouds will be familiar with OpenStack amd will use it or at least have adopted some of the technological thinking behind OpenStack. Less know might be juju and CEPH.  Akash Chandrashekar is working as a solution engineer at Canonical which is the organization behind Ubuntu Linux and he gives a very clear explanation how your can build clouds by using OpenStack, juju and CEPH.

To give some highlevel background before watching the video on the 3 components; OpenStack, juju and CEPH.

OpenStack: OpenStack, a cloud-computing project, aims to provide an infrastructure as a service (IaaS). It is free and open-source software released under the terms of the Apache License. The project is managed by the OpenStack Foundation, a non-profit corporate entity established in September 2012 to promote OpenStack software and its community.

juju: Juju (formerly Ensemble) is a service orchestration management tool developed by Canonical Ltd.. It is an open-source project hosted on Launchpad released under the Affero General Public License (AGPL). Juju concentrates on the notion of service, abstracting the notion of machine or server, and defines relations between those services that are automatically updated when two linked services observe a notable modification. This allows for services to very easily be up and down scaled through the call of a single command. For example, a web service described as a Juju charm that has an established relation with a load balancer can be scaled horizontally with a single juju "add-unit" call, without having to worry about re-configuring the load-balancer to declare the new instances: the charm's event based relations will take care of that.

CEPH: Ceph is a free software storage platform designed to present object, block, and file storage from a single distributed computer cluster. Ceph's main goals are to be completely distributed without a single point of failure, scalable to the exabyte level, and freely-available. The data is replicated, making it fault tolerant.



In case you want to view the slides about the presentation deploying openstack and CEP with Juju at your own speed and comfort please find the slides below as they are shared on slideshare.

Ceph Day Santa Clara: Deploying Ceph and OpenStack with Juju from Inktank