Baidu Cloud Compute (BCC) vs OpenStack Barbican

Baidu Cloud Compute (BCC) creates and manages elastically scalable cloud server instances. Instance families include general-purpose, compute-optimized, storage-optimized, GPU, and FPGA options, with public, marketplace, service-integration, or custom images. Users can adjust instances and bandwidth, scale resources, and connect private data centers in a hybrid cloud. APIs cover creating, stopping, querying, reinstalling, and releasing instances; remote access uses Client, SmartTerm, or VNC. Security features include multi-layer DDoS protection, failover completed in seconds, automatic snapshots, an instance-level virtual firewall, and monitoring alerts. The product page states 99.9999999% data durability. Postpaid use is billed per minute, rounding partial minutes up; prepaid terms run one to nine months or one to three years, while reserved instances use one- or three-year commitments. BCC supports web, API, Linux, and Windows, and creating an instance requires real-name certification.

OpenStack Barbican is the OpenStack Key Manager service for storing, provisioning, and managing secrets such as keys, certificates, passwords, and raw binary data. Its barbican-api component provides an OpenStack-native REST API for managing secrets; barbican-worker and barbican-keystone-listener are also part of the service. The listener manages Barbican’s database records for Keystone projects when those projects are deleted. A plugin architecture lets operators connect software secret stores or hardware such as HSMs. Documented options include KMIP, Dogtag, and Vault secret-store plugins, as well as PKCS#11 crypto plugins. With PKCS#11, master encryption and HMAC keys can reside in an HSM. Operators can develop plugins for storage, generation, and event handling, though support status may be stable, experimental, or out-of-tree. The default Simple Crypto plugin stores its single encryption key in plaintext in barbican.conf, so service-node access must be restricted carefully. Container ACL settings do not carry over to associated secrets, and ACL functionality requires Keystone integration. Barbican is free under Apache 2.0; installation guidance assumes a working OpenStack deployment.