Intel’s Imad Sousou: OpenStack is at a crossroads
AUSTIN, Texas – Data centers run the risk of being overwhelmed as demand for content and remote resources continues to grow. OpenStack needs to reinvent to help the industry flourish, said Imad Sousou, VP and GM of the Open Source Technology Center for Intel, during the OpenStack Summit this week in Austin, Texas.
OpenStack is the open source software platform used to manage storage, processing and other data center hardware functionalities.
“Today I want to talk to you about what I think is an inflection point of how we are, I feel, at a crossroads,” Sousou said, before channeling former Intel Chairman and CEO Andy Grove, who once said, “there are two options: adapt or die.”
“We are at one of those moments, especially in a couple of areas,” Sousou said, calling out orchestration, scheduling and development processes used in OpenStack.
Sousou explained how a group of Intel engineers set out to take everything they know after years of using and building OpenStack and use that information to rebuild the platform.
The goal, Sousou said, was to “reimagine how this would look” and the result is a “redesign and a reimplementation of the schedulers and a few key pieces of OpenStack.”
The project is called Cloud Integrated Advanced Orchestrator that looks to decentralize decision making. According to materials from the Clear Linux Project: “It is based on a pull model, allowing compute nodes to request jobs from the scheduling agent. The scheduler is always aware of the launchers capacities, never asking for updates and the scheduling decision time is kept to a minimum. Launchers asynchronously send capacity to the scheduler.”
Sousou described the work Intel did on CIAO: “In total there is 5,000 [virtual machines] and 10,000 containers all done in one minute or likely less. As you all know, this is orders of magnitude better. Our biggest challenge right now, obviously is we want that from OpenStack. We’d like to see this in OpenStack. … We have what I will call a dogma of [technology]. But why? Why can’t we use the right tool and the right programming language for the thing that we want to do. This goes across a lot of aspects of trying to evolve our community and our development model and development process so we are able to use the right tools and the right processes for what we want to accomplish.”
