5 Reasons to Build Private Cloud on OpenStack
Our century is rightfully considered the fastest in history: science and technology are developing so rapidly that it is impossible to keep track of all their aspects. It is especially true for IT — many processes are being optimized; more promising approaches are being invented. Security is increasing in parallel with digital threats to the environment, data privacy and even democracy. Therefore, each enterprise and business need to be aware of changes and current innovations because this guarantees appropriate flexibility, strong competitiveness, customers’ interest, and demand.
Public vs Private
In the last decade, one of the inevitable trends has become the transition to cloud solutions and cloud computing. Mainly because it’s convenient. Or, more specifically, due to:
- scalability, which allows you to withstand growing loads and process large amounts of data;
- elasticity so you can increase the capacity of the infrastructure without investing in hardware and software;
- different cost optimizations, further elimination of capital expenditures;
- and self-service, which means that consumers request and receive the required resources in minutes.
There are two main types of cloud solutions: the public cloud that provides cloud services and resources shared between many customers, and the private cloud, where the on-premise cloud infrastructure is owned by the organization or hosted by a partner. The public cloud transforms all expenses into operating expenses, enables a fast solution, but leaves reasonable questions about data security, sovereignty and control. In the case of a private cloud, you need to make capital investments in hardware and a data center or find a reliable partner to host and manage cloud environments. However, you also retain complete control over the IT infrastructure and fast unconditional access to the data with a private cloud.
At first glance, public cloud solutions for enterprises look cheaper and need less effort to start; why not just use them? Dig deeper, count thoroughly, and you can find the truth behind the attractive marketing offers of hyperscalers.
The fact is that some of the public cloud features can turn into significant disadvantages for organizations.
- The main one is the limited control opportunities. The workload, data, and services performance are entirely under third-party provider control. High configuration ability also helps to ensure the agility of the IT department — it is much easier to make changes and deploy the required service when you have unquestioned access and fully control all the components.
- Another drawback is data security questions related to public environments and increased risks of data leak and malware attacks. Regardless of the security and privacy promotion public cloud providers make, protecting the valuable data on private clouds is always much more reliable, and most importantly — totally controlled.
- Public clouds can not compete with private ones when operating with large amounts of sensitive data. Private clouds’ high performance is usually associated with working within internal firewalls and protected network perimeter.
OpenStack Cloud: Proven by Time and Business
The next challenge you meet is the right choice of technology to implement your cloud. As recent surveys report, one of the most popular options is OpenStack, a large set of software projects that can be used to create infrastructure cloud services and cloud storage, both public and private.
OpenStack has become a de-facto standard for open-source-based private clouds and is actively used in data centers management and industries like Telco, Healthcare, Research and Science, and government management. The reasons for such popularity are predicted IT costs and further CapEx reduction, flexibility, high level of data security. Enthusiastic professionals create OpenStack to make the cloud adoption process faster and easier for enterprises while keeping reliability and security at a high level and minimizing possible risks.
The OpenStack platform works on the principle of a constructor where you can select from a comprehensive list of supported modules to cover current needs and assemble a unique solution. The modules can be integrated with each other, which ensures the stable operation of the product. The list of modules is long, and it is constantly updated. It sounds easy, but in practice, choosing the right components to set, install, update, and administer such a complex system needs OpenStack knowledge and expertise. It can be pretty hard for a newer user to play with OpenStack bricks without instruction and experience and build something outstanding, reliable, and functional.
5 Reasons Why
So, summing up all the listed benefits of the OpenStack technology for cloud deployment, and specifically enterprise private cloud, we can identify five key reasons to opt for such a combination:
- Cost reduction. When it comes to network bandwidth-intensive workload, the private cloud can really save money for enterprises in the long run. According to the latest OpenStack User Survey, 72% of respondents chose OpenStack for cloud deployment in order to save money over alternative infrastructure choices. Many companies have already benefited from the return on investment that OpenStack-based solutions provide. In some cases, the cost-saving on the platform and virtual machines reaches 40 % over the previous experience with clouds.
- High security. Private clouds created with OpenStack technologies allow you to effectively maintain the confidentiality of your data by customizing protection and security policies specifically for the interests of your company.
- Scalability. By implementing your logic into the private cloud configuration and using ready-made OpenStack modules, you can quickly and easily expand the existing architecture or make changes to the existing ones.
- Flexibility through control. Public cloud strategy often brings interoperability and company flexibility limitations in cloud choice. The multi-cloud approach is becoming more popular day by day. A smart mix of public and private cloud solutions for different workloads looks like the perfect way to manage operations for many organisations. To keep independence and flexibility and avoid vendor lock-in situations, it is critical to understand if the enterprise can easily move their workloads from one cloud to another or such migration could be technically problematic or costly. With private cloud solutions, you can control everything and configure and tailor the services to specific needs and requests.
- Deployment speed. OpenStack private clouds allow accelerating adoption of cloud technologies by enterprises. Due to ready-to-go OpenStack services and components, it’s the right choice to deploy a small pilot site or comprehensive cloud environment of large size easily and quickly.
With all the wide range of functions and advantages mentioned above, OpenStack certainly requires knowledge and skills. Sometimes this fact restrains organizations from making quick decisions in OpenStack favor. It takes time, money, and efforts to grow the professional staff inside the company or gain the highly demanded specialist.
Move Forward Together
The right decision is to find a reliable and experienced partner to help the enterprise accelerate the cloud adoption process, avoid possible mistakes, and save time, effort and money.
Sardina Systems, an official OpenStack vendor and a founding member of OpenInfra, would be happy to become your cloud partner. Our main product is FishOS, a fully automated technology for reliable management of enterprise private clouds. Its high efficiency is proven by a large number of effective deployments and non-stop cloud operations. FishOS has successfully passed the latest InterOp tests to confirm the technology as OpenStack powered. Today we are ready to build and manage clouds for our enterprise customers on Xena, the newest OpenStack release.
FishOS can be smoothly integrated with current enterprise environments to improve productivity and save IT costs. The extensive network of highly professional and reliable partners helps Sardina Systems provide more complex IT solutions like Remotely Managed Cloud and Hosted Private Cloud.
We use our knowledge, expertise and top-notch technologies like OpenStack, Kubernetes, Ceph to support our customers’ growth and scale their business.
The source https://www.sardinasystems.com/5-reasons-to-build-private-cloud-on-openstack/
