Cloud computing technology has come a long way since its start, and now it even offers Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) servers. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) includes many cloud-related tasks, such as deleting, creating, and managing servers. Managing all the tasks offered by IaaS manually will be difficult. That’s where solutions, such as OpenStack, OnApp, etc., help customers. Luckily, OpenStack and OnApp offer many features to help customers manage their servers. But, selecting either OpenStack or OnApp depends mainly on customer requirements. In this tutorial, we will do a comparison study on OpenStack vs OnApp.
Why Use Cloud Management Solutions?
Providing ready-made infrastructure solutions includes server addition of resources, upgrading resources, removing resources, and many more. The number of such tasks involved in creating and managing a server will be too high. Therefore, manually handling these tasks is somewhat tricky. When the customers can use managed IaaS services to ease their work. Cloud management solutions, such as OpenStack and OnApp, come in handy for service providers to manage cloud computers efficiently.
OpenStack
OpenStack is a free, open-source software platform for cloud computing. OpenStack is a cloud Operating System used to control the deep pools of computing, networking, and storage resources within a data center. With the continual hard work of developers and cloud computing technologists, OpenStack helps to provide both private and public clouds. OpenStack is primarily used and implemented as an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for cloud computing.
OpenStack is a software platform that uses multiple virtual resources to manage and create a public and private cloud. OpenStack’s default cloud-related services are storage, networking, identity, image services, etc. Users can handle the services offered by OpenStack via command-line tools, RESTful API, or a web-based dashboard. Fortunately, OpenStack Dashboard provides complete control for administrator users to provision and manage virtual servers.
OnApp
OnApp is a UK-based software company that allows service providers to build, sell, and operate cloud servers. Users can use OnApp to operate the private cloud, public cloud, or even content delivery network services.
OnApp can also operate the OnApp Federation (a wholesale cloud infrastructure marketplace), which helps the service providers to sell and buy cloud infrastructure managed by OnApp software. It also enables enterprises to adopt a hybrid cloud model by combining their on-premises cloud infrastructure with public cloud resources.
The hypervisor helps in the smooth functioning of OnApp. In simple terms, hypervisor helps the users to host several different virtual machines on a single hardware.
Fortunately, OnApp comes with a fully automated control panel that allows easy management of cloud services. Some of the other benefits offered by OnApp are handling virtual machine failover, load-balancing, etc.
OpenStack vs OnApp
1. Pricing
While choosing a Cloud management solution, pricing will always be a major concern for customers. For customers who are looking for free solutions, OpenStack will be the ideal solution as it comes as open-source software.
But, those customers who are looking for ready-to-sell options may have to choose OnApp. The use of OnApp involves the purchase of a license. The issue of OnApp licenses is based on the number of server cores and, the cost starts from $8.00/core per month.
2. Hypervisor
Similar to the pricing, hypervisor availability also plays an important deciding role.
OpenStack does not offer hypervisors for its users. But, OpenStack allows users to use hypervisor technologies like Xen, KVM, etc., with their server.
Unlike OpenStack, OnApp depends on the hypervisor. The choice of hypervisor offered by OnApp depends on the type of virtual machines that need to be set up as part of the cloud. The problem with hypervisor is that it affects all virtual machines on the server. Therefore, periodic management of hypervisors becomes an essential aspect in OnApp to avoid server downtime.
3. User Friendly
Both OpenStack and OnApp come with a Cloud management panel.
OpenStack panel allows users to manage a large pool of servers. As a result, developers can significantly reduce development and testing time. OpenStack also comes with options, such as creating servers rapidly and on-demand. A typical OpenStack control panel looks similar to the one shown below:
Similar to OpenStack, OnApp also offers a complete cloud management panel. It helps users to automate cloud setup and removal. Besides, OnApp also comes with options to set up failover systems, load balancers, and many more. Overall, the user-friendly control panel of OnApp allows users to use and manage the cloud services easily. A sample OnApp control panel looks similar to the one shown below:
4. Maintenance
Maintenance is one of the critical factors in any software. When the user encounters a problem with Cloud solutions, it creates a roadblock. And, this issue becomes critical when it affects multiple virtual machines.
Using OnApp without proper and suitably patching can lead to additional issues. OnApp customers usually get into trouble when they miss installing these patches on time.
But, in the case of OpenStack, there always exists the support of the open-source community. And, the OpenStack software keeps evolving day by day to fit in the newer requirements for each user.
Conclusion
In short, both OpenStack and OnApp come with a series of attractive features for easy Cloud management. This tutorial presents the comparison between both OpenStack and OnApp. Hope this tutorial was helpful, and do reach out to us if you have any queries or suggestions.
