There are lots of new OpenStack services being developed and the hottest ones is the containers as a service Magnum. The project is so new that it's not even in the Project Navigator http://www.openstack.org/software/project-navigator but it has been at the center stage at the past two OpenStack Summits. In this talk we'll answer to questions like: What is Magnum, what services does it offer, why is it important and why is a large operator looking into deploying it in production?
Application developers are increasingly looking at containers as a better way to manage the whole application lifecycle, from deployment to constant maintenance. Projects like Docker, CoreOS, the Open Container Initiative all aim at making life of application developers easier. OpenStack Magnum project offers container orchestration engines for deploying and managing containers as first class resources in OpenStack.
Magnum is meant to launch a minimalistic host OS such as Fedora Atomic, CoreOS, or Ubuntu Snappy. The OS includes enough tools to launch Docker, Kubernetes, and Flannel. Once the OS is launched, Magnum configures the OS clusters for multi-tenant users.
For public cloud operators like DreamHost the questions that need to be answered are essentially two: how ready is Magnum for prime time and how hard is it going to be to keep it running at scale? In this talk I'll summarize the findings of my feasibility research regarding OpenStack Magnum.