Ravello Introduces OpenStack LabCloud on AWS
Ravello Systems, Inc. today announced the availability of OpenStack LabCloud on AWS, which significantly accelerates the adoption of OpenStack by providing multinode KVM based OpenStack lab environments on demand, for development, testing, training, demos, proofs of concept and evaluations. Rather than wait for hardware or rely on hosting providers for setting up their sandboxes and test environments, individual developers and enterprises can simply leverage capacity from AWS or Google Cloud, and install any version of OpenStack on it. The ability to spin up a complex multinode OpenStack environment in minutes, with a usage based pricing model starting at $0.30/hour, represents enormous savings in time and cost for the OpenStack community.
“One of the issues slowing down the pace of OpenStack development and adoption in the industry is limited access to hardware resources for testing and evaluations,” said Frank Rego, Business Development Manager at SUSE. “Ravello’s innovative approach of autoprovisioning multinode lab environments in the public cloud will accelerate OpenStack development and should reduce time to deployment."
Until now, it was not possible to run a hypervisor like KVM in a public cloud because cloud virtual machines do not support nested virtualization natively and they do not expose a clean L2 network to the applications on top. Ravello’s nested virtualization solution makes it possible to run a hypervisor on top of public clouds and it also exposes a clean L2 network with distributed switch, router, and application services like DNS and DHCP. Now it is possible to setup KVM nodes, configure them as OpenStack compute nodes, install Nova networking, Cinder/Ceph storage and more to form a complete OpenStack multinode environment on top of a public cloud like AWS or Google.
Although most developers have powerful desktops with quad core processors they quickly realize that it is not sufficient to create proper multinode OpenStack environments for testing. In addition, they may be limited to the use of qemu instead of full KVM, which is rather slow.
With Ravello’s OpenStack LabCloud, developers have self service access to spin up their own multinode OpenStack environments in public clouds like AWS and Google Cloud, test their code, and shut down the entire deployment when they are done and only pay for usage.
OpenStack distributors and ISV partners face the challenging task of making upstream code “enterprise ready” by hardening it, packaging it, documenting it and making it more consumable for the average enterprise. The process of manual and automated testing in parallel on various OpenStack configurations requires significant hardware resources. The cost of having enough multinode environments is so high that most companies compromise by using smaller sandboxes and sharing test environments all of which leads to poor quality and slower release cycles.
Ravello enables OpenStack distributors and ISV partners to spin up as many multinode OpenStack environments as they need, in public clouds like Amazon AWS and Google Cloud for testing.
Since OpenStack is such a rapidly maturing technology, enterprises need representative preproduction, test environments to test out patches, upgrades and new versions before rolling them out into their production infrastructure. Migrating existing application environments from VMware based infrastructure to an OpenStack based private cloud is another challenge. However, the capital and operational expense required in procuring and maintaining these test environments, is very high. As a result, enterprises don’t test as much as they want to, and roll updates into production and then face problems. In addition, enterprises would like to provide training environments for their infrastructure teams.
