I am using cloudberry to backup data. There are lot of options where we can store data like Google drive , aws and also openstack. I got confused because I was thinking openstack as operating system which we can install in our premise..please someone explain..what's openstack actually??


Openstack is something you might install to setup an self-service IaaS platform that manages VMs, storage and network. Whereas the top three cloud providers have written their own proprietary IaaS platforms a small cloud provider, or a large company, cannot feasibly code there own cloud-like management software, so they might setup their “private cloud” using openstack (or, say, a big vendors distribution of it) so that many internal projects can use it as self-service IaaS. To quote Wikipedia with some expansion by myself:

OpenStack is a free and open-source software platform for cloud computing, mostly deployed as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), whereby virtual servers and other resources are made available to [internal or external] customers. The software platform consists of interrelated components that control diverse, multi-vendor hardware pools of processing, storage, and networking resources throughout a data center. Users either manage it through a web-based dashboard, through command-line tools, or through RESTful web services.

People might talk about it being “your operating system for private cloud” which is a bad analogy. In general the term “operating system” is often deliberate misused as it has positive connotations and might indicate to none technical people the broad benefits of investing in a given technology. For example people might also talk about container orchestrators such as Kubernetes or Docker Swarm being “the new operating systems of the cloud” which is a similar poor analogy.

If a backup project said it provides connectors for AWS S3, Azure Blob, Google Cloud Storage, and Openstack Swift then it would be more clear exactly what it does: write large binary backup files into a cloud store. Such a product could then accurately say it supports AWS, Azure, GCP, and Openstack. Just to be clear I am not saying the the technology you are looking at actually uses those APIs I am making a general point about openstack having feature parity with many public cloud technologies.

  • Thanx for reply...but i'm still confused, when we create any instance in openstack ,its created in our premise or public cloud? actually i'm new in openstack... – Dhiraj Golhar Jan 7 at 9:24
  • one uk cloud provider focusing on Uk Government entities as customers offers either openstack or VMware as their IaaS solution.The idea being a uk government entity can rent its own private openstack that isn’t shared with other uk gov entities but each one can have many teams/applications self-service their VMs, storage and network. A large bank that might want to hold all its Swiss business in a private Swiss data centre will install openstack on-prem there to provide many internal systems with “private cloud” solution. I see no benefits of running openstack on to of another cloud stack. – simbo1905 Jan 7 at 10:05
  • an instance of openstack is a big a platform with pools of compute and storage on many servers that people can self service. if you use the main three public clouds you get all that already with their tools so you wouldn’t spend your time replacing their tools with openstack. theoretically a very large customer could theoretically do a special detail to setup openstack on hardware at a major cloud providers data centres but it would be hard to imagine why – simbo1905 Jan 7 at 10:11
  • ok .... thank you very much simbo 1905 for your guidance. – Dhiraj Golhar Jan 7 at 10:53
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    The way to thank people is to upvote both their answers and also their comments ;-) – simbo1905 Jan 7 at 10:55

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