StackOps 360 comprises four main products: a deployment automation tool; a pre-packaged high availability tool for service providers with tight service-level agreements (SLAs) to fulfil; a chargeback facility for those who want to set up pay-as-you-go public clouds or service internal business customers; and an extensible UI development framework called StackOps Portal.

OpenStack abstracted

“We have kind of abstracted the whole OpenStack for a sysadmin who doesn’t have the time to get trained on OpenStack,” COO and co-founder Arturo Suarez explained to me, referring to the StackOps Automation tool.

As for the chargeback tool, Suarez explained that it collects metrics from the layers above the user’s Openstack infrastructure, as well as from that infrastructure itself. “You can create products which are going to be a mix of parameters coming from pure infrastructure – CPU, RAM, etc – or from the applications running on top,” he said. “

The StackOps Portal is interesting, too – eschewing the Horizon UI of OpenStack itself, it is instead an extensible HTML5 rich web application that can be used to manage any public or private OpenStack clouds, regardless of the vendor behind the distro.

Lower learning curve?

Of course, StackOps is far from the only company trying to take the effort out of OpenStack deployments for smaller users. Nebula is a key competitor, although Suarez is somewhat dismissive of that company’s plug-and-play model, which is based around a hardware controller.

“They’re selling the controller. The cost of that solution is really going to be higher because they’re using specific components,” he said. “Nebula also does not have a portal – they have Horizon in a fancy interface, nicely tuned, but it still doesn’t allow you to do some of the operations that you need to do in your cloud, such as managing your catalog.”

Suarez also pointed out that, unlike many competitors, StackOps doesn’t rely on third-party products such as Puppet (see disclosure) or Chef to handle deployments. He claimed there was risk involved with using such tools, especially with Puppet’s ties to VMware, and suggested the learning curve was higher using them than with his company’s package. “You really don’t need to know OpenStack to deploy an OpenStack Cloud with StackOps,” he said.

StackOps certainly talks a good game, and it will be interesting to see how its easy-as-possible approach to OpenStack plays out in the small service provider market, as a counterpoint to the likes of OnApp. The company just opened an office in Austin, Texas, to push harder into the American market. “When it comes to selling cloud, it’s much faster than here in Europe,” Suarez observed.

Disclosure: Puppet Labs is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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If that’s the case, then tools for provisioning should be not only easy to use but fast.

Opscode’s Chef and Puppet Labs’ Puppet (see disclosure) have gotten plenty of use in recent years as open-source configuration-management tools, but devops people have also been giving nods of approval to a lesser known but arguably faster product called SaltStack.

While Co-founder and CEO Marc Chenn cited speed as a differentiator, the other is the language in which users can make SaltStack commands: Python. Those characteristics help qualify SaltStack as a finalist in the Launchpad competition to be held at GigaOM’s Structure conference in San Francisco on June 19-20.

“There was a collective sigh of relief when SaltStack came to the market,” Chenn said. SaltStack can “introduce to (developers) a framework and a solution in a language that was preferable to them.” As opposed to Ruby, that is.

The product has roots in the experience of Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Tom Hatch, Chenn said. Hatch (pictured) worked as an infrastructure architect on managing large and complicated infrastructures for different groups inside the U.S. intelligence community, as well as at enterprises, Chenn said. He was a heavy Puppet user, and he was also familiar with Chef. But the tools weren’t good enough for his taste. “None of the tools were quite fast enough,” Chenn said, and they were hard to implement on complex infrastructures. So he started constructing SaltStack project. He open-sourced it in February 2011.

The tool has received praise on several Hacker News threads. It’s also come in handy for devops pranks such as popping open hundreds of server CD-ROM trays at a time.

But it’s not all fun and games. The company has 120 paying customers. While it can’t call Facebook one of them, as Opscode can, SaltStack does count another webscale player, LinkedIn, as a user. The company runs SaltStack to do manage configuration across tens of thousands of nodes, said SaltStack’s vice president of marketing, Rhett Glauser.

And SaltStack is looking to get more big companies using the tool. Earlier this year, following similar moves by Opscode and Puppet Labs, it came out with an enterprise package, which provides support for large deployments.

It could be challenging to win over devops people, given Puppet and Chef’s popularity, but Chenn doesn’t come across as too concerned about that. “Clayton Christensen’s on our advisory board,” he said.

Disclosure: Puppet Labs is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of GigaOM/paidContent. Om Malik, founder of GigaOM, is also a venture partner at True.

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Opscode, the name behind the Chef tools that many developers use to automate the configuration and deployment of IT, has got more than a toehold in the cloud landscape. Earlier this week Joyent, another cloud provider, said it was integrating Chef into the Joyent cloud.

As I wrote then, tools like Chef, CFEngine and Puppet Labs’ Puppet (see disclosure) ease the creation and management of system configurations. A key benefit is that, once the associated scripts of a deployment are created, they can be deployed regardless of the underlying operating system or, in this case, cloud. At least in theory.

Opscode VP of marketing Jay Wampold says IBM and Microsoft’s moves show that enterprise customers are ready for cloud-type deployments. “If you look back over a decade, you see that Google, Facebook and Amazon figured out how to leverage large-scale infrastructure to deliver to consumers built from the ground up on code. Now you’re seeing major [older] enterprises moving IT from a back-office support function for internal operations into a front-office effort that is a touch point for consumers,” Wampold said.

That means enterprises need to develop, configure, test, deploy and monitor applications in web time and at web scale, which is where the devops movement and tools like Chef and Puppet come in. IBM bought UrbanCode, another devops player, earlier this week.

The devops school pushes developers and IT people to work together on fast, incremental tech deployments rather than at cross-purposes. Where Chef and Puppet differ is that Chef focuses more on developers while Puppet concentrates on admins — the “ops” side of devops.

As part of this deal, Opscode has agreed to support IBM’s AIX Unix operating system.

The news of the past few months seems to indicate that Chef has momentum  – although an IT person who watches this space would not give Chef the edge, necessarily. “Chef and Puppet both seem to be doing great. The push by AWS and Joyent is probably more a function of the fact that Chef is easier to stand up as a hosted service than Puppet,” he noted.

Another factor could be that VMware recently invested $30 million more in Puppet, something that makes some businesses wary> The fear is that Puppet won’t be totally dedicated to heterogeneous environments, a worry that Puppet Labs CEO Luke Kanies denies. The VMware relationship does help Puppet in the private cloud market  but “we’re not changing our roadmap for VMware, and they don’t have anything resembling a controlling stake,” Kanies said via email.

Disclosure: Puppet Labs is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Expect more pledges of support to come out of Opscode’s annual conference kicking off tomorrow in San Francisco. Tools like Chef and Puppet Labs’ Puppet (see disclosure) ease the creation and management of system configurations. One key benefit is that, once the associated scripts of a deployment are created, they can be deployed regardless of the underlying operating system or, in this case, cloud. At least in theory.

In Opscode parlance, Chef configurations are deployed and managed via a “cookbook.” Joyent’s support of Chef means it will be easier, going forward, for customer to move cloud deployments to and from any cloud, said Joyent CTO Jason Hoffman in a recent interview.

“Chef, rather than the bare APIs, thus becomes the abstraction layer,” Hoffman told me. “By supporting Chef we make workloads more mobile. If Amazon calls an instance M1 why don’t we have one?” If that nomenclature is standard across clouds, the various scripts will work more easily anywhere.

That means, in Hoffman’s view, that folks who’ve deployed workloads in AWS, but want better and more explicit service level agreements or other contractual terms that AWS may not grant, can move the whole kit-and-kaboodle over to Joyent or, truth be told, vice versa.

As to why Chef appears to be gaining so much traction over CF Engine and Puppet? Hoffman thinks it’s because Opscode is more aligned with developers whereas Puppet targets admins, or the “ops” constituency of devops. In January, Puppet received an additional $30 million investment from VMware, funding which leads some to see Puppet falling into the VMware camp — a contention that Puppet CEO Luke Kanies denied at the time of the deal, pledging to continue support for heterogeneous hypervisors and environments.

Joyent, along with the various OpenStack-allied vendors, is hoping to take business from Amazon which, to be fair, isn’t taking that potential threat lying down — AWS has been adding more enterprise-friendly features and services recently. Later on Wednesday, we’ll hear about how the EMC and VMware-backed Pivotal Initiative plan to take on AWS and other cloud competitors. And, to further muddy the waters, VMware said on its earnings call Tuesday night that it will launch its public-cloud take, which it calles VMware Hybrid Cloud Service on May 21. We’re going to need a score card.

No doubt we’ll hear more about Hoffman’s vision of mobile cloud workloads and the increasingly competitive cloudscapewhen he takes the stage at Structure 2013 in San Francisco on June 19

Disclosure: Puppet Labs is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Ansible co-founder Said Ziouani.

Systems administrators and developers want one tool for deployment, configuration and management — they don’t want to deal with agents and add-ons, said Said Siouani, CEO of Santa Barbara, Calif.-based AnsibleWorks.

No doubt Ansible’s orchestration engine will face off against popular configuration tools like Opscode Chef and Puppet Labs’ Puppet (see disclosure). Siouani characterized Ansible as a more “holistic” solution than what is on the market now in that it focuses on configuration management and actual deployment.

Ansible co-founder Michael DeHaan.

Ansible itself is an open-source project kicked off a year ago by Michael DeHaan, one of the Red Hat vets who also spent time at Puppet Labs (see disclosure) and was also the force behind Cobbler, a popular Linux server installation tool.

In the ensuing year, Ansible has drawn some name-brand users including Aerospike, AppDynamics, Basho Technologies, Care.com and Gawker Media. And, as of Tuesday, AnsibleWorks will provide maintenance and service subscriptions for that toolset.

“We’re coming into this fresh with an all-open source solution that is flexible enough to configure all your systems — physical, virtual and which uses a text-based language, not scripting, which makes it easy to learn to use,” said Siouani, who spent 10 years at Red Hat and was most recently executive vice president of sales at Eucalyptus.

Disclosure: Puppet Labs is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Rackspace CTO John Engates

Shocker:  cloud computing can increase headcount

One fear among IT people is that the move to cloud computing will mean job cuts. But that may not really be the case, according to a new Rackspace-backed survey. Among 1,300 U.K. and U.S. companies surveyed by the Manchester Business School, more than half (62  percent) said they actually increased headcount or boosted wages and bonuses using IT savings realized from their move.

“We really think [cloud deployment] can create jobs under the right circumstances,” Rackspace CTO John Engates said in an interview. “It leads to innovation and that … opens up the floodgates and gives people access to tools for more innovation — it’s a virtuous cycle.”

Of course,”if you’re the guy who punches the button on the server every day, you might have to retool your skill set,” he added.

Cloudtech has more on the survey.

Best and worst of times for Microsoft Azure storage

Microsoft Azure storage had an up and down week: On Tuesday, it beat out Amazon S3, HP, Rackspace, HP and Google as the best cloud storage provider according to results of performance tests by Nasuni. On Friday however, it suffered an embarassing worldwide outage after letting an SSL certificate expire.

Microsoft has been down this certificate expiration road before, as have other cloud providers.

One function of the Netflix security monkey is that it checks all our certs for expiry dates and warns us. We learned this the hard way too.—
adrian cockcroft (@adrianco) February 23, 2013

Rackspace moves to tiered pricing

On Friday, Rackspace cut prices on its content delivery network (CDN) services and said it would move to tiered price model for other services. Most reporters (including yours truly) saw this as a competitive move against Amazon Web Services.

But Rackspace CMO Suaad Sait said the move does not signal a race to the bottom in cloud pricing. “We’re not trying to start any crazy price war,” he said in an interview.

He characterized both the CDN price cut and the tiering move as a response to customer input. “If you look at our bandwidth pricing, it was out of whack compared to what surrounded it,” he said.

Net, net, he said, there has been no change from Rackspace’s “fanatical support” theme nor its goal of being the proven premium provider of cloud services. 

More cloud news from around the web

Storage kingpin Seagate joined the OpenStack Foundation and Open Compute Foundation. OpenStack is an open-source cloud effort pushed by some 150 vendors.  OpenCompute was initiated by Facebook last year to push the design of standard, energy-efficient hardware for webscale data centers.

U.S. CIO Steven VanRoekel says the federal government has barely scratched the surface of cloud-big data convergence opportunities. 

Telecompaper, citing a new KPMG Cloud Monitor survey, reports that more than a third of German companies surveyed use cloud computing.

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New Opscode Private Chef dashboard.

Opscode says it beat rivals CFEngine and Puppet Labs (see disclosure) in a bake-off to become Facebook’s configuration tool of choice and that Facebook, which was a CFEngine shop, actually helped it test out  the new version of Private Chef over the last few months.

Playing up the Facebook angle

In a Chef press release, Facebook production engineer Phil Dibowitz is quoted saying: “Opscode Private Chef provided an automation solution flexible enough to bend to our scale dynamics without requiring us to change our workflow.”

Opscode execs would not comment on the actual size of the Facebook test bed — but called it “Carl Sagan-sized big.”

Having Facebook as its big, cool customer/friend also helps Opscode counter the fact that Puppet Labs’ big cool customer/friend is Google.  (Google Ventures also invested in Puppet).

“The biggest thing for this release [of Chef] was to get to scale..and a lot of what we did in this release for Facebook was stuff we were planning to do ourselves anyway, Facebook just gave us a huge test bed,” Opscode CTO Christopher Brown said in an interview. For this project, Opscode rebuilt much of its basic stack in a new language and moved its core database from CouchDB for PostgreSQL.

“We realized the way we built our original server with Ruby and our older stack wasn’t giving us the concurrency and scale we wanted so we rewrote it in Erlang and went from NoSQL to, believe it or not, a relational database,” said Jay Wampold, VP of marketing for Opscode. Opscode’s rather symmetrical workload is actually better suited to what relational databases do. Because Chef typically does as  many writes and its schema are not all that deep and complex, a relational database is well suited to the job, he said.

CFEngine, Puppet and Chef are all used by  developers and systems admins to automate provisioning and change management for massive scale-out cloud computing environments. Their use is critical to the DevOps movement in which software developers and operations people work together to make sure software projects meet business goals.

One code base, three routes to market

Old Opscode Command-line interface.

The three flavors of Chef all build off the same foundation:  Private Chef runs in-house behind the firewall; Hosted Chef is a hosted managed service offering; and open-source Chef is a free download. But with the new Chef 11 code base, Opscode is changing up its sales and support models. First, Private Chef, which used to be offered as a perpetual license, will now be available by subscription and cost $6 per node per month — the same pricing as Hosted Chef. Second, the company now will offer two paid support options for the open-source version of Chef for customers updating to the new Chef 11-based version. Price for a standard support subscription will be $3 per node per month; premium is $3.75 per node per month.

Opscode also announced a slew of new channel partners including CDW, Ingram Micro, SoftChoice and ISVs Autodesk and Collabnet, with an eye of pushing Chef more broadly to market.

Last March, when the company announced a Series C round of  $19.5 million, Opscode launched what it called a broad push to entrench its tools in enterprise accounts. In that attempt, its new Facebook-endorsed scale could be a help with the largest of potential customers.

Disclosure: Puppet Labs is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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The startup, which launched in June, is seeking its Series A round and is currently bootstrapped by the three founders. The company employs seven people and offers Software as a Service (Saas) as well as on-premise deployments. Unlike some of the other configuration management or other cloud-provisioning and management tools out there, ComodIT is aimed squarely at the enterprise — although anyone else can use it too. The company offers identity management and compliance-related features that enterprise customers need, but has taken an API-reliant approach more familiar to the dev-ops community.

However, it is also built so that other tools can easily integrate with it, meaning customers can bring their own cloud tools with features ComodIT doesn’t have. It even posted the code for Synapse, the software that governs its agent, which helps track virtual instances and other IT assets the ComodIT platform controls on GitHub earlier this month.

ComodIT will compete against clusters of open-source software as well as IT management software from established vendors like RightScale and giants such as CA, but it’s worth watching because it’s trying to bridge multiple clouds with its software. If it succeeds it could essentially wrap all available clouds into a user-friendly Platform as a Service (PaaS) with enterprise levels of control.

ComodIT is one of five finalists in our Structure: Europe Launchpad competition, which will take place on October 16th in Amsterdam. More information can be found here.

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And Ryan Park, operations engineer for the San Francisco company, knows a lot about what it takes to keep the systems supporting all that growth running. In his view, devops plays an important role there. Devops is the school of thought which mandates that developers and IT operations people work together to deliver new features to end users/customers. Traditionally, developers worked on more monolithic code releases and then threw them over the wall to the operations people who –ready or not — had to deploy the software. In many cases neither camp knew much about what the other did and that tended to lead to deployment issues.

The much-touted advantage to devops is a faster, more efficient delivery of needed new features. More incremental updates and faster fixes means happier end users/customers. What has been less covered is that devops is hard. It is, it’s a new way of doing business, but it’s still worth doing. The learning curve for tools like Puppet Labs’ Puppet (see disclosure) and Opscode’s Chef is pretty steep, but that shouldn’t stop companies from using them, Park said.

Here, from Park, is a boiled down list of what companies should do to make the devops transition as painless as possible and build a solid process that lasts.

1: Use automation. Take a look at the available tools, pick one and use it, Park said.  Pinterest uses the Puppet configuration management tool which automates the process of launching new servers as needed and — perhaps more importantly — configuring them correctly.

“Before there was a lot of manual integration, a lot of tracking names and checking what server was doing what, adding access for new users. It was all by hand and a real pain and it wasn’t always reliable — maybe only 91 of 100 servers got rolled out, automation solves that,” he said.

2: Build a single source of truth. It’s still not easy but the use of the Puppet or Chef dashboard makes it easier to  keep track of which systems are running in house or on Amazon EC2. “It’s important to get in the habit of setting up that source of truth — systems need to know the names of all the servers and which are running memcached [distributed object memory] or other services.” Park said. But to get that all-important repository, that data has to be entered.

3: Mitigate culture clash. Developers and ops people think and  work differently largely because they have traditionally had conflicting goals.  Developers want to deploy the coolest stuff fast and ops people want to make sure the systems that are running now keep running.  It helps to hire software engineers that understand something about operations and operations pros that understand something about development. And both groups need to be aligned with the company’s business goals.

4: Think ahead. Enterprises that already have large dev and ops teams in place have one set of problems getting those camps to work together. Startups have an advantage in that they’re starting smaller, but as they ramp up, it’s important for them to set up their processes and technologies right so that changes and additions down the road come easier, Park said.

5: Embrace the community. There’s a growing number of devops pros out there. Use them.  Get on the right mailing lists, attend meetups and vendor conferences. Pinterest’s Park will speak about devops lessons learned at the Puppet Conference is coming at the end of the month, for example.

 Disclosure: Puppet Labs is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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The Seattle-based company unveiled a new services practice geared to help customers assess their current infrastructure and guide their DevOps implementation, as well as provide on-site consulting and training. And, using some of that services know-how, the company is also rolling out new configuration management, continuous delivery and scale-out web operations solutions using Opscode’s Private Chef and Hosted Chef.

Jay Wampold, Opscode VP of marketing.

“Early in the curve, open source innovators used our open source Chef to build out infrastructure … What’s changed in the last six to eight months is we’ve got major enterprise engagements — they know they need to do [DevOps] but they don’t know how, not just from a business case perspective but there’s a skills gap in the enterprise on how to execute,” Jay Wampold, VP of marketing said in an interview.

In short, DevOps isn’t just for dev or ops people anymore, it needs to be explained to other stakeholders in the enterprise to smooth out adoption wrinkles. That’s why Opscode and DevOps rival Puppet Labs (see disclosure) and others are beefing up training, deployment templates and ancillary offerings.

The long and short of it is in the increasingly dynamic world of technology, “automation is hard and everyone needs help,” said Mary Johnston Turner, research VP of enterprise systems management software for IDC.

“Opscode, like Eucalyptus and Puppet, started taking stuff in the open-source community and tried to create commercial, hardened, revenue-generating software solutions, and what they’re finding — and this is not a negative thing — is that while savvy DIY folks can pick this stuff up and run with it, but once you move into the commercial realm, you really need not just hardened software that’s supported, maintained and updated, but you need enabling services to help the customer get the most value out of it.”

Disclosure: Puppet Labs is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Feature photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Svetlana Larina

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