OpenStack distro comparison
Looking for a detailed OpenStack distro comparison? Have a look at the table below and see how Canonical’s Charmed OpenStack differs from other distributions. Discover more by clicking on each Charmed OpenStack cell. Use our calculator to estimate the cost of your private cloud infrastructure with Canonical.
Charmed OpenStack
|
Red Hat OpenStack Platform
|
Mirantis Cloud Platform
|
|
|---|---|---|---|
| Open source | No | Yes | |
| Release cadence | 6 months with an LTS every 18 months | No predictable release cadence | |
| Maximum support timeline | 5 years | 3 years | |
| License pricing | Per socket-pair | No license required | |
| Support pricing | Per socket-pair | Per host + base price for the control plane | |
| Availability of consulting services | Yes | Yes | |
| Availability of managed services | No | Yes | |
| OpenStack deployment mechanism | Red Hat OpenStack Platform Director (based on TripleO) | DriveTrain (based on Git, Gerrit, Jenkins and SaltStack) | |
| OpenStack upgrades | Very complex manual procedure | Fully automated | |
| Bare-metal provisioning tool | Ironic | MAAS | |
| Operating System management tool | Red Hat Satellite | Not provided | |
| Control plane | Containerised | Virtualised | |
| Supported hypervisors | KVM | KVM, Xen | |
| Supported SDN platforms | OVN, OVS, Juniper Contrail, Cisco ACI, OpenDaylight | OVS, Tungsten Fabric, Calico | |
| Supported storage platforms | Ceph, NFS | Ceph |
Cheaper than Red Hat OpenStack Platform
By applying a per host pricing model, Canonical’s support services for OpenStack are cheaper than those offered by Red Hat. A per host model is much more predictable than the per socket-pair model as organisations only have to pay for the number of servers being used, regardless of the number of CPU units inside them. Moreover, no license is required to get started with Charmed OpenStack. This means that organisations only have to pay for the environments that require enterprise support, such as the production environment, while they can run their testing and development environments free of charge.
Simpler than Mirantis Cloud Platform
Instead of relying on various interconnected tools, Canonical uses OpenStack Charms for OpenStack deployments, operations and upgrades while providing the same value. OpenStack Charms are orchestrated by Juju which abstracts the entire OpenStack complexity, enables an IaC (infrastructure as code) approach and provides a SaaS (software as a service) experience. This results in a simpler OpenStack platform, fewer resources required to maintain it and reduced operational costs.
Open source, unlike VMware
Charmed OpenStack is fully open source which allows it to benefit from a broader community, faster development process and broader selection of technology choices than those available in VMware’s vRealize platform. Choosing an open source platform avoids vendor lock-in. Charmed OpenStack is also much cheaper than VMware vRealize. Under certain circumstances, migrating from VMware to Charmed OpenStack can reduce costs by 88%.
More secure than public clouds
Security becomes one of the most important aspects when designing IT infrastructure. As a result, many organisations are migrating their sensitive data to a private cloud. Charmed OpenStack offers a production-grade solution for private cloud implementation providing the best possible security level. It can also be more cost-effective compared to public cloud providers, especially long-term and when running workloads at a large scale.
Canonical fully supports public clouds, providing the most popular operating system for public cloud workloads — Ubuntu.