Watcher's entry into the OpenStack "big tent" confirms b<>com's desire to become an essential player in this open source community. Watcher, which was intended to provide a resource consumption optimization solution for data centers, was accepted as an official OpenStack project on May 31, 2016.
Developed over the past 18 months, Watcher is an infrastructure optimization tool for OpenStack, the famous open-source cloud "infrastructure manager". The strength of the IRT, which initiated this project, was to create and unite an international community of 25 contributors, including IBM and Intel, which joined the project in September 2015.
For Antoine Cabot, Watcher Technical Project Leader (PTL) and Head of the Cloud Computing Lab at b<>com : "We are now the first French contributor to the world's largest open-source project! The community, which includes 2336 contributors for the latest version, called Mitaka, who are mostly Americans, is booming right now. In April, 6 years after it was created, 7500 people were at the last edition of the OpenStack Summit in Austin."
Watcher's promise: improving the OpenStack infrastructure manager through the optimization of virtual machine placement. As the initial virtual machine placement was often highly disparate, Watcher aims to reorganize them via full knowledge of the infrastructure and its history. The algorithm uses prediction mechanisms to identify future processing and keep the contractual commitments set between the cloud provider and its client.
* "Big tent" Principles implemented by the OpenStack community 18 months ago to approve a project's mission and ensure it is in line with the mission of OpenStack.
Click here to check out Antoine Cabot's Watcher presentation.
