RDO OpenStack Promises Easy, Free Open Source Cloud Computing

The folding of private cloud vendor Nebula a couple of weeks ago seemed to suggest that OpenStack is becoming the exclusive domain of large, established open source companies that can package and integrate the cloud-computing platform for easy deployment. But that may not be the whole story, if RDO, a community-based OpenStack distribution, succeeds.

RDO is a version of OpenStack designed for use on CentOS, a Linux distribution based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Actually, “based on” is a bit of a stretch, because CentOS is basically the RHEL source code recompiled by third parties—which is totally legal and kosher with Red Hat, of course, since the source is open. The only difference between CentOS and RHEL is that the former comes with no enterprise-class support or ecosystem integration.

Accordingly, RDO also lacks enterprise support services. For those, you’d need an option like RHEL OpenStack Platform, or one of the various other commercial OpenStack distributions from vendors such as Canonical, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) or VMware (VMW).

But RDO aims to make up for its lack of enterprise-class support by making OpenStack setup and configuration easy. As Alvaro Lopez Ortega, OpenStack R&D Engineering Manager at Red Hat explained in a recent interview, RDO “makes OpenStack easily consumable with Fedora, CentOS and RHEL systems,” in its developers’ view. “OpenStack is fairly big and complex, and deploying it isn’t a trivial task. RDO is a community of people who provides both packages and deployment tools that allows anybody to build his OpenStack based cloud environment.”

The idea of making OpenStack easy, even if it does not come as part of a commercial cloud package, is a big deal because, so far, most groups interested in deploying OpenStack have had to choose between paying for expensive commercial support or attempting to set up the platform themselves—which is no trivial task, even for seasoned IT administrators.

By making OpenStack setup simple enough for anyone—or anyone with a fairly standard set of technical skills, at least—projects such as RDO stand to keep alternative routes to OpenStack deployment open, even as startups such as Nebula fold and leave entrenched vendors as the only companies standing in the commercial OpenStack world.

By the way, because RDO is based on CentOS, it works on all of the Linux distributions related to CentOS and RHEL—including RHEL itself and Fedora. That adds to its potential, since it means that any organization with servers running RHEL or a similar platform can take advantage of RDO.