The Canonical Distribution of Ubuntu OpenStack [LWN.net]

Canonical has announced a new OpenStack-oriented distribution. "Based on Canonical’s industry-leading OpenStack reference architecture and building on Ubuntu’s leading position as the most widely used OpenStack platform, the Canonical Distribution gives users the widest range of commercially-supported vendor options for storage, software-defined networking and hypervisor from Canonical and its OpenStack partners. It then automates the creation and management of a reference OpenStack based on those choices."

Note that some conditions apply: "The Canonical Distribution of Ubuntu OpenStack is now available as a public beta, free for up to 10 physical and 10 virtual machines". See this page for more information.

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The Canonical Distribution of Ubuntu OpenStack

Posted Oct 28, 2014 15:23 UTC (Tue) by idupree (guest, #71169) [Link] (2 responses)

Are those "conditions" in the form of proprietary software licenses, or Canonical's servers being an integral part of their "Canonical Distribution", or are they part of a service contract, or...?

The Canonical Distribution of Ubuntu OpenStack

Posted Oct 28, 2014 17:10 UTC (Tue) by NightMonkey (subscriber, #23051) [Link] (1 responses)

Indeed, a good question. Doesn't it seem galling to piggyback on the work of many, many others, then artificially limit it?

The Canonical Distribution of Ubuntu OpenStack

Posted Nov 1, 2014 20:29 UTC (Sat) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828) [Link]

I think it's slightly more aggrieving that they're effectively breaking "The Ubuntu Promise" (http://www.ubuntu.com/about/) I've said before that I think that was the wrong thing to promise, but they're short-cutting it by effectively saying "Ubuntu will always be free, but the Canonical distribution must be paid for".

I get that the Canonical Distribution is basically highly tied into Landscape, but it's still a weird attempt to side-step Ubuntu.

The Canonical Distribution of Ubuntu OpenStack

Posted Oct 28, 2014 17:19 UTC (Tue) by jhoblitt (subscriber, #77733) [Link] (10 responses)

This seems to be a fairly comprehensive offering, at least on paper, and looks like an Ubuntu equivalent of RedHat's RDO, a cloud provisioner similar to mirantis' fuel web, managed services similar to metacloud (now cisco) / mirantis, and some sort of hosted offering on softlayer. The only pricing I can find is $15/server/day for managed services -- which seems pretty steep considering the number of servers needed for an HA deployment.

The Canonical Distribution of Ubuntu OpenStack

Posted Oct 28, 2014 21:28 UTC (Tue) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (5 responses)

True, $15/host/day would have been pretty good 4 years ago. Now, for yet another hosting provider with barely any track record, it sounds very high.

Not sure I'd want to bet that Canonical will be in the hosting business long-term. They seem to be a jack of many trades, master of none.

The Canonical Distribution of Ubuntu OpenStack

Posted Oct 28, 2014 21:39 UTC (Tue) by jhoblitt (subscriber, #77733) [Link]

I'm not convinced that pay per {seat,node,TiB,core,etc.} business models are reasonable when applied to distributed systems. The general point of cloud infrastructure, unattended provisioning, configuration management, distributed job systems, etc. is that it's not much, if any, extra [software] effort to spin up additional VMs or drop bare more metal into place.

I suspect the "sales" view point is "think of all the revenue we can generate from the customer with 10,000 nodes and it'll take the same effort as supporting the customer with 100 nodes". It seems like that's an easy sales model to undercut but I won't claim to understand "business".

The Canonical Distribution of Ubuntu OpenStack

Posted Oct 28, 2014 21:46 UTC (Tue) by jhoblitt (subscriber, #77733) [Link] (3 responses)

To be clear, that's $15/day/node to *manage* your hardware at your site; it's not hosting.

The Canonical Distribution of Ubuntu OpenStack

Posted Oct 28, 2014 21:56 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

If this is full system administration/security/etc then it's high, but not insanely high. I've seen very large companies who have stated that their costs are close enough to this to be comparable.

We also don't know what sort of quantity discounts will exist. I would expect that the pricing for large scale systems will be FAR cheaper than this (and if not, it will fizzle)

The Canonical Distribution of Ubuntu OpenStack

Posted Oct 29, 2014 16:43 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (1 responses)

Ah, that's an important distinction that I'd missed. Here's the full quote again: "Canonical, the world’s leading cloud platform company, will build, support and operate your OpenStack cloud for just $15 per server per day, plus hardware and hosting." (I guess I quit reading at the final comma)

So now I'm picturing: you buy and support the hardware and install Ubuntu's images, and Ubuntu remotely manages the openstack-based server software?

The Canonical Distribution of Ubuntu OpenStack

Posted Oct 30, 2014 11:05 UTC (Thu) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641) [Link]

Ubuntu also has Metal As A Service software:
https://maas.ubuntu.com/

So maybe you only need to install one server with an Ubuntu image and add the other servers you want to have them manage to the MAAS-portal.

The Canonical Distribution of Ubuntu OpenStack

Posted Oct 28, 2014 21:57 UTC (Tue) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (3 responses)

Do you have a reference of the per-node pricing? The fact sheet and the press release say "The cost of experimenting just dropped to zero" so it would be hard for that to be true and for there to be a per node fee.

The fact sheet downloadable from here: https://insights.ubuntu.com/2014/10/28/ubuntu-openstack-t...

Fact sheet also seems to indicate that Ubuntu Advantage service might be bundled in. Or it might be a value-add..I'm not really sure. Since Landscape management is explicitly included, and Landscape is part of Ubuntu Advantage now, not broken out as a separate offering as far as I can tell...it seems like some level of UA contracted support is involved here. And UA pricing is not per node. So if you have a reference to the per node pricing, I'd love to see it.

I won't quote the fact sheet directly on the pricing for Ubuntu Advantage because I want everyone to go pull that sheet for themselves... then take a swig of water in the mouth..hold it there.. and then read the availability zone pricing information and see if you can avoid doing a spit take on your computer screen when your body seizes up due to the sticker shock. Take another swig of water, re-read the pricing section again, notice that its flat rate, not per node so someone running 10 nodes is paying the same as someone running 99...and do another spit take.

Then after everyone has read the fact sheet and not choked while reading it, come back and let's have a discussion about how competitive Canonical's pricing strategy actually is.

-jef

The Canonical Distribution of Ubuntu OpenStack

Posted Oct 28, 2014 22:00 UTC (Tue) by jhoblitt (subscriber, #77733) [Link] (2 responses)

http://www.ubuntu.com/cloud/bootstack

The Canonical Distribution of Ubuntu OpenStack

Posted Oct 28, 2014 22:14 UTC (Tue) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (1 responses)

bootstack is a diferent value-add product that predates the "Canonical Distribution" thing which was just announced today.

Bootstack is basically Canonical offering to do the work to..build your a private cloud..and run it for you...and then hand you the keys when you decide you don't want them doing the day-to-day care and feeding for it.
You tell them the requirements, they build it up to your specification.

That $15 per day per node is on top of hosting costs. It's deployment and operations manpower costs essentially.

So the idea here is you can choose to use Canonical Distribution and then still also choose to pay for Bootstack on top of the cost of using the Canonical Distribution instead of having admin manpower staffed to manage the thing. I think. Pretty sure from the fact sheet that Bootstack is an addon service for "Canonical Distribution".

-jef

The Canonical Distribution of Ubuntu OpenStack

Posted Oct 28, 2014 22:31 UTC (Tue) by jhoblitt (subscriber, #77733) [Link]

I very clearly said "The only pricing I can find is $15/server/day for managed services" and referenced metacloud + mirantis. The key phrase being *managed services*.