Julien Ducros, CEO of Lost Oasis, gave an exclusive interview to TIO News in order to explain how they bring flexibility to the Cloud through their new Open Source Cloud Computing project, NiftyName.
Why did you create NiftyName?
Actually, there were several reasons for creating NiftyName.The first is that, at Lost Oasis, we manage groups of servers which are becoming increasingly heterogeneous. Therefore we needed to simplify the management of our server park. Cloud Computing enables the pooling of resources. It can reduce energy consumption in the data centers, limiting the space used by the equipment and electricity consumption. Then there is the API problem. NiftyName allows us to have more than a single method of access to resources. In addition, access to these resources is faster and easier. The third advantage of NiftyName solution is that with the Cloud, there is no physical installation of equipment: the cloud allows to distinguish the physical part from the engineering part. Thus, we can split our team between software engineers and hardware experts. Finally thanks to Cloud, there are no geographic notions in data hosting anymore: we can now move the data according to individual needs.
How is it different from Amazon?
In fact, the approach is different. NiftyName focuses on infrastructure. It is a hardware virtualization platform. With NiftyName, layers of abstraction are low. Users have access to the platform easily. We emulate processors, storage areas similar to hard drives, networks, switches.
Do you think that you owe Fabrice Bellard a lot?
Yes. Fabrice created all wrappers for KVM, Linux native virtualization technology.Without him and QEMU project, KVM would not have been possible. And without KVM, QEMU would probably not exist in its current form. KVM and QEMU make complementary relationship
How do you guarantee against the risk of losing data?
NiftyName enables to work with geographically redundant platforms. There are primary and secondary sites. Storage is replicated between the primary and secondary site.
Why did you make it Open Source?
We want to benefit from the expertise of other developers. We want every person potentially interested to be able to read our code and contribute improvements. Also, for the sake of transparency: we think our users and clients must be able know exactly how the platform operates. In addition, open sourcing opens the possibility to implement NiftyName on architectures or environments we never thought of.
You were selected by the "TIO Safe" sponsored by French Government. How do you contribute to this project?
We contribute to "TIO Safe" by the publishing our Cloud Computing solution and by integrating our project with projects made by the other partners of "TIO Safe". Connectors will be developed to interface with other Cloud Computing platforms and make sure data can be exchanged more easily and more transparently.
Interview by Elodie Pot - writer
Lost Oasis - http://www.lost-oasis.fr/
NiftyName - http://www.niftyname.org/
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