Why Is OpenStack So Attractive to OpenML#

There is a profound difference between automating vendor-locked-in infrastructure and actually owning the foundation. Much of modern cloud computing, such as AWS and GCP, reduces developers to mere tenants paying for compute cycles. OpenStack bypasses those superficial layers, giving us the raw materials to architect hyper-scale cloud environments from the ground up. This framework naturally accommodates the pursuit of fully autonomous AI and deeply autonomous private clouds because it guarantees total control without external interference or vendor lock-in.

It also demands a foundational, deductive approach to systems architecture. We aren’t just calling a black-box API; we are interacting with the fundamental first principles of computing—compute, network, and storage. It is infrastructure in its most genuine, unvarnished form, stripping away the commercial polish to give us pure, uncapped capability.

Strategy of OpenStack in Cloud Sector#

Cloud computing promotes more efficient utilization of resources by reducing the transaction costs involved in provisioning and deprovisioning infrastructure to near zero, and it is able to do so because it differs in qualitative ways from previous models of computing (including virtualization). OpenStack identified 2 in particular:

1. Self-service: Clouds are self-service. They provide users with the ability to deploy applications on demand without having to wait for human action or review in the loop. The cloud has no ticket trackers. This requires robust multi-tenancy and on-demand provisioning of course
2. Application Control: Clouds allow control of an application’s infrastructure to be vested in the application itself. Just as clouds eliminate the need for a human approver in the loop, they also eliminate the need for a human user to be in the loop. While a cloud may have a user interface (graphical or otherwise), it must have an application programming interface. It should supply operationally relevant information in a form that is legible to applications, including event notifications where appropriate. It should also be designed to facilitate secure access to its APIs for applications that are running within the cloud itself, because no part of the application should need to reside outside of the cloud.

Most proprietary clouds are operated by software designed by and for a single organisation. OpenStack is different - there are many OpenStack clouds, both public and private, each operated by a different organisation with different goals and making different decisions. These clouds may have overlapping sets of users. This leads to some requirements that are specific to OpenStack, and may not be shared by other clouds.

OpenStack’s strategy is designed to provide a highly interoperable, scalable, and vendor-neutral cloud infrastructure layer through the following core principles:

• Interoperability and Compatibility: Applications must be easily portable across different public and private OpenStack clouds, hiding underlying deployment implementation details. Public APIs are versioned to ensure bidirectional compatibility, allowing graceful interaction across older and newer client environments.

• Flexible Architecture: Projects are encouraged to use soft dependencies rather than hard dependencies to preserve operational flexibility, only requiring strict dependencies when they provide significant security or scalability benefits. Resource partitioning allows operators to define arbitrary, hierarchical groupings rather than tying them to physical hardware topologies.

  What is “Soft Dependencies""

  A “soft dependency” means that a specific feature within a service is only available if another, optional service is installed and running.

  Unlike a “hard dependency” which forces a cloud operator to deploy an additional service just to get the base project to function at all, a soft dependency keeps the core service fully operational even if the supplementary service is missing.

  This approach provides a compromise between design simplicity and operational flexibility (software engineers must build a more complex system capable of handling multiple environments). It allows projects to reuse functionality from other OpenStack services without forcing every cloud operator to maintain a massive, rigid stack of required services just to run a minimal cloud.

• Data Center and Hardware Abstraction: OpenStack abstracts raw data center systems to provide a consistent, vendor-independent API for hardware virtualization. This extends beyond virtual servers to encompass storage, networking, firewalls, and specialized hardware like GPUs and FPGAs.

OpenStack Source Code#

The link to the official, canonical OpenDev OpenStack Git Host is opendev.org/openstack.

OpenStack @ OpenML#

TBA