Insights into how technology and the outsourcing of R&D are changing the software industry

Yesterday my CTO and I were given a demo of OpSource’s new OpSource Cloud, now in private beta. My company, Symphony Services, already is an OpSource partner, but as we’re starting to get more involved in developing Cloud-based solutions and POC’s, we figured to take a look under the hood. Admittedly we didn’t see much, but here are some early observations:

• Nice admin features: You start with a primary admin account which can then create any number of sub-admin roles with a lot of ability to set permissions based on role. Seems more granular control than what you have with Amazon.
• You have to set up a VLAN at the outset, so there’s an additional layer of security before the firewall.  Unless and until you open up the firewall the cloud is locked down.  Good fit for people who are looking for private clouds.
• The network set up seems superior in some ways to what AWS offers, particularly the IP mapping ability
• They offer a ‘local’ storage option as opposed to just cloud storage, which can help with application performance on data-intensive operations.  But today the limit is 400GB per virtual server which seems kinda limited, especially when you consider how many people have terabyte drives in their homes now and that many of the really large information services providers have petabytes of data that they’re working with.  But then again, OpSource seems to be focusing on the Enterprise rather than large service providers, so it may not be as much of an issue.
• While spinning up new servers seemed very simple and there was quite a lot of control given, what we didn’t see was anything about dynamic provisioning.  Perhaps we’ll see that once we start playing around in the sandbox during the private beta.
• With their focus on the Enterprise they’re making some clever use of their OpSource Billing solution (that they acquired when they purchased LaCayla about a year and a half ago) by being able to bill at the sub-account level, ostensibly to help charge different departments based on usage.
• The UI is a bit primitive, but they copped to that right up front and there’s no reason to believe that they won’t have this fixed when the product is ready to go live.

So we certainly saw enough that we’re going to give it a test drive and become part of the private beta, and perhaps run a few client POC through it as an alternative to Amazon Web Services.  Keep you posted as we learn more.