Hong Kong Government Innovates with OpenStack

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The basic idea behind the cloud is that it enables greater agility and faster time to market, which are two key characteristics that all startups crave. The Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) recognizes the need for cloud technology for startups, and by way of its wholly owned Cyberport initiative, is now aiming to help tech startups.

Cyberport announced last week the official launch of a community cloud platform powered by open source OpenStack technology. The new Cyberport Cloud provides Hong Kong startups with an easy on-ramp to the cloud as they seek to deliver services to new customers.

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In a video interview at the OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong, David Chung, CTO of Hong Kong Cyberport, explained how entrepreneurs can now benefit from the cloud and a new breed of Software Defined Networking (SDN). Chung explained that prior to the official launch, the Cyberport Cloud was in beta for a year, during which time, 30 customers signed up to be part of the program. The Cyberport Cloud is currently based on the OpenStack Grizzly release with the Ubuntu Linux as the bare metal operating system.

On the networking side, Cyberport is using the Open Contrail SDN controller from Juniper Networks. Juniper open sourced its Contrail controller in September of this year. SDN enables organizations to de-couple networking functions and flows from physical hardware in a bid to create more flexible networks.

“We are trying to take advantage of SDN capabilities and we want to offer networking as a service,” Chung said.

Chung added that startups want to be able to provision their own network services but they don’t know how to do it. To that end, Cyberport has a single dashboard view to let startups provision virtual machines and the associated network services at the same time.

In general, Chung said that technology startups today understand the benefits that cloud computing can deliver, though they don’t always understand how to get to the cloud. That’s the goal of Cyberport: to be a gateway to the cloud.

Watch the full video with David Chung, CTO of Hong Kong Cyberport below:

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Datamation and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.