There's an old saying that when you're up to your neck in alligators, it's hard to remember that you started out to drain the swamp. So step back for just a minute and think not in terms of making today's OpenStack work, but in terms of what OpenStack could be.
We are just starting to get down to the business of making hybrid cloud work, enabling users to burst loads from a private cloud a different, public cloud as the need for more resources arises. But imagine an OpenStack cloud where anyone can contribute resources, and anyone can consume them. Such a cloud could have virtually limitless resources, and could be completely decentralized, just as the internet itself was meant to be. Those who contribute resources could get paid based on the use of those resources, and users could pay for both resources and applications based on usage, not ownership.
But wait a minute, you might say, it'd be chaos! How would users know what resources are available? Or who's trustworthy? Or where their data is? How would providers get paid? How would developers distribute their applications?
The truth is that even if this scenario isn't practical today, the seeds for all of this functionality already exists in OpenStack. In this talk, we'll look at:
- What a World Wide Cloud might look like
- How users can contribute resources
- How end-users can evaluate which resources to use
- How billing could be handled
- Distribution of applications
This talk is a thought experiment meant to start a discussion about just what is possible.
