Technology has come a long way and now it even offers server Infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

Iaas involves too many cloud related tasks like creating, deleting servers and more. Managing all of them manually will be really difficult. That’s where solutions like OnApp, OpenStack, etc. helps.

Luckily, OnApp and OpenStack comes with too many features. But, the choice depends largely on customer requirement.

At Bobcares, we often get consultation requests about choosing the right software for managing the cloud solutions as part of our Infrastructure Management Solutions.

Today, we’ll do a study on OnApp vs OpenStack and how our Support Engineers help customers to make the right choice.

Why to use cloud management solutions?

Giving ready made infrastructure solutions involves server addition, removal, upgrade of resources and many more. And, the number of such tasks will be high too. Therefore, manually handling these tasks will be rather difficult. That is where managed Iaas gets an upper edge.

Cloud management solutions comes handy for service providers to manage cloud computers easily. Let’s now have an overview of cloud management solutions like OnApp and OpenStack here.

OnApp

Firstly, we’ll have a quick view on OnApp.

OnApp software enables service providers to build, operate and sell cloud servers. It can operate in public cloud, private cloud or even in Content Delivery Network services.

The working of OnApp involves a hypervisor. In simple terms, hypervisor enables us to host several different virtual machines on a single hardware.

Fortunately, it comes with a fully automated control panel that allows easy management of cloud services. Other benefits include handling virtual machine fail-over, load-balancing, etc. It can even handle the billing too.

OpenStack

Now, let’s check the details about OpenStack too.

OpenStack is a free and open-source software platform for cloud computing. OpenStack is powered by a group of developers and cloud computing technologists. With their continual hard work,  OpenStack helps to provision public or private clouds easily.

Again, the OpenStack solutions are also simple to implement, massively scalable, and feature rich.

Fortunately, OpenStack Dashboard gives administrators full control for users to provision and manage virtual servers.

OnApp vs OpenStack

Till now, we had a quick look on OnApp and OpenStack. But, when it comes to live production servers, making the right choice can be difficult.

Let’s now take a look on how our Dedicated Engineers help customers choose the best for their cloud solution.

1. Pricing

While choosing a business solution, pricing will always be a major concern for customers. Again, the fund to be put in the project depends on the criticality of the work too.

For customers looking for free solutions, OpenStack will be more ideal as it comes as an open source software.

But, for those who are looking for ready to sell options, they may have to go ahead with OnApp. Use of OnApp involves purchase of license. They issue licenses based on the number of server cores. And, the cost starts from $8.00/core/mo.

2. Hypervisor

Similarly, the presence of hypervisor also can be a deciding factor.

OpenStack doesn’t have a hypervisor. But, it allows to use hypervisor technologies like KVM, Xen, etc.

Unlike OpenStack, OnApp depends on the hypervisor. And, the choice of hypervisor depends on the type of virtual machines to be set up as part of the cloud. That’s why, our Support Engineers always install base packages on the local drive before hypervisor installation.

Again, problem with Hypervisor affects all virtual machines on it. Therefore, periodic management becomes an important aspect in OnApp to avoid server down time.

3. User friendly

Similarly, user friendly features really help to make things easier while managing cloud servers.

Luckily both OnApp and OpenStack comes with a cloud management panel.

OpenStack panel allows to manage a large pool of servers. It comes with options like creating servers rapidly and on-demand. As a result, developers can significantly reduce development and testing time.

A typical OpenStack panel looks as shown below.

Similarly, OnApp offers a complete cloud management panel. It automates cloud setup and removal. Besides, it comes with option to setup load balancers, fail-over systems and many more. Overall, the user-friendly control panel allows OnApp to make cloud service management easier.

A sample OnApp panel will have the following look.

4. Scaling up

Yet another major reason for going ahead with cloud solutions is scalability. It allows customers to set up a few servers now and then scale up as and when need arises.

Unfortunately, we’ve seen scaling problems in OpenStack platforms. A solution that works in private cloud can create issues in large cloud block. The challenge mainly happens during the scaling of the network across many racks of servers. Mostly, these happen due to the components involved in the build process. Here, our Cloud Experts do continuous tests on wider networks, to avoid potential failure of the product.

But, OnApp has built-in solution that easily allows scalability. However, it can increase the monthly costs. In general, OnApps per core model may not fit very well in offering cheap servers.

5. Maintenance

Last and not the least, maintenance is really critical in any software. When you encounter a problem with cloud solution, it creates a road block. And, it becomes really critical when it affects multiple virtual machines.

Using OnApp without properly patching can lead to additional issues. From our experience in managing servers, we often see OnApp customers getting into trouble when they miss to install patches on time.

But, in the case of OpenStack, there always exist the support of open-source community. And, the software keeps evolving day by day to fit in the newer requirements.

Till now, we saw the top parameters in cloud solutions. However, before making a choice between OnApp and OpenStack, our Support Engineers also check the type of data and its volume too.

[Need help in choosing the right cloud solution ? Our Cloud Engineers can help you.]

Conclusion

In short, both OnApp and OpenStack comes with a series of attractive features for easy cloud management. Today, we did a comparative analysis of OnApp Vs OpenStack. We also saw how our Support Engineers help customers to choose the best cloud management solution.