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AppScale AWS clone for private clouds

Replica

Article from ADMIN 76/2023

By Martin Loschwitz

AppScale promises a private cloud with full AWS compatibility as a way out of vendor lock-in and hefty bills.

In early days, the public cloud – and especially AWS – was a good thing. People were able to shift large parts of their own IT equipment fleet to the cloud and seemingly save large amounts of cash because they no longer had to operate their own IT infrastructure. In the meantime, the tide has turned. As the workload running in the cloud has grown, the monthly bills from AWS have become horrendous, and because the company's entire setup is now completely oriented on AWS and its various services, it is no longer possible to roll back.

At the same time, many of the hyperscalers' promises turned out to be more or less irrelevant in day-to-day operations. It's a cool fact that you can scale a web server setup from 10 to 1,000 nodes in next to no time, but it doesn't actually happen in reality, especially because many companies have not rebuilt their applications to take advantage of this level of scalability. In other words, you are paying for the kind of flexibility that you can hardly use in a meaningful way from the outset.

However, maybe there is something your can do: The AppScale suite lets you build a private cloud with the promise of being API-compatible with AWS, at least in terms of key features. At the same time, the setup is easy to build, which the vendor believes puts it ahead of other solutions like OpenStack. Under the hood, however, AppScale is genuinely open source software. For example, the Ceph object store is used as the storage stack, which is reason enough to take a closer look at the solution. What can AppScale do, how easy is it to set up, and what costs are you looking at?

A Question of Money

Before I get into the technical details, it's a good idea to look at the financial side of AWS and a move back to your own physical hardware in more detail. Solutions like AppScale have one obvious weakness: They presuppose that you operate your own infrastructure,

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