Closely Interlinked

The third member of the group, Canonical, has maintained a very close relationship with the developers of OpenStack since the beginning. It was Canonical lead Mark Shuttleworth, himself, who some time ago replaced Eucalyptus with OpenStack in Ubuntu and thus partly triggered the OpenStack hype. It is not a coincidence that OpenStack releases usually happen just a few days before the Ubuntu releases in April and October.

Technically, the Ubuntu cloud is solid: On the basis of MaaS and Juju, it provides the same functionality as that offered by SUSE and Red Hat. Moreover, admins of Ubuntu systems can install a normal Ubuntu and put together their own OpenStack deployment using official Ubuntu packages without paying any license fees. Although users then are without support, this combination is very popular: Many OpenStack setups rely on Ubuntu to keep this freedom.

Mirantis: The Underdog

The maker of Mirantis takes its slogan "Pure Play OpenStack" seriously, and even offers a proprietary deployment tool called Fuel (Figure 5). Fuel gives admins an easy and simple approach to installing Mirantis' own OpenStack packages on both Ubuntu and Red Hat systems.

Figure 5: Fuel by Mirantis is considered the tool par excellence when it comes to building an OpenStack cloud without a distributor; however, the tool is currently going through major changes.

However, Fuel is currently in a state of flux: About four months ago, Mirantis announced that it wanted to rewrite the Kubernetes-based tool completely, which prompted it to bring Google and Intel on board. Until further notice, it does not seem to be a good idea to establish a new setup on Fuel.

Genuine Pure Play Does Not Exist

Incidentally, when Mirantis refers to "Pure Play OpenStack," it primarily means that OpenStack users with Mirantis are not automatically dependent on one of the major distributors. Pure Play OpenStack is not currently offered by any of the major providers: SUSE, Red Hat, Canonical, and Mirantis each enrich their OpenStack packages with various patches, which means, on the one hand, backported fixes from later versions of OpenStack and, on the other, new functions.

However, all manufacturers set great store by unimpeded compatibility with the official OpenStack versions of the services – probably because the OpenStack project can put the thumbscrews on the manufacturers at this point: With the help of a RefStack [3], a running OpenStack installation can be tested for its API's compatibility with the requirements of the OpenStack project. The higher the official compatibility, the better things look for the cloud operator.