Many service providers face the challenge of competing with the pace of innovation and investments made by hypercloud vendors. You constantly need to enable new services (e.g., containers, platform as a service, IoT, etc.) while remaining cost competitive. The proprietary cloud platforms used in the past are expensive and struggle to keep up with emerging technologies. It’s time to start planning your future with an open source solution that enables a software defined infrastructure for rapid innovation.
A growing number of service providers have selected OpenStack due to its low cost and its rapid pace of innovation. Many new technologies are introduced early in their development in OpenStack prior to making their way to proprietary and hyper-cloud platforms. Well known examples include containers, platform as a service and network function virtualization. Why not leverage the work of a growing community of thousands of open source developers to gain a competitive edge?
For those service providers unfamiliar with OpenStack, SUSE recently published a paper entitled, “Service Providers: Future-Proof Your Cloud Infrastructure,”to highlight some of the architectural choices you will need to make when implementing an OpenStack environment. While the concepts are not new, several decisions will need to be made up-front based on the data center footprint you wish to address.
While OpenStack may seem a bit complex at first, the installation and operations of vendor supplied distributions have greatly improved over the years. Support is available from the vendors themselves as well as from a large community of developers. Most service providers start with a relatively small cloud and build from there. Since OpenStack is widely supported by most hardware and software vendors, you can even repurpose your existing investments. The upfront cost to begin your OpenStack journey is low. When you’re ready to get started, SUSE offers a free 60-day evaluation trial of our solution (www.suse.com/cloud).
Now is the time to map out the future of your software-defined infrastructure. Take advantage of the most rapidly evolving cloud platform with no vendor lock-in. Build your offering on some of the best operations automation available today. OpenStack is the best way to control your own destiny. For more information, please visit our site dedicated to cloud service providers at www.suse.com/csp.