EdLUG:2007-04-27
From ScotLUG
OpenLDAP, Present and Future
by Howard Chu, Chief Architect, OpenLDAP and Chief Architect, Symas Corp.
1930, Friday April 27th 2007
See some Pics of Howard Chu taken after the lecture.
Edinburgh University, Appleton Tower Lecture Theatre 1, Crichton Street, near George Square, Edinburgh.
- Thanks to Edinburgh University for the venue, in conjunction with the IT Forum.
- Refreshments provided
- Book prize for the best post-talk question.
Contents |
OpenLDAP is Ubiquitous, Performant, Community-driven and Flexible
Ubiquitous
OpenLDAP is the most-used Open Source LDAP server. From large distributed corporate directories to backing store for Samba3 to addressbook server in small offices, OpenLDAP is everywhere. Current work will make OpenLDAP easier to configure and even more scaleable, to systems in one sense or another both smaller and larger.
Performance
OpenLDAP is reliable and scaleable. When head-to-head with popular commercial products like Microsoft Active Directory OpenLDAP provides more guarantees and higher transaction throughput. Other products are popular with different enterprise markets, and OpenLDAP compares well against them: Novell e-Directory, SunOne, etc. See some benchmarking commentary.
Community-driven
OpenLDAP is the intersection for a lot of community activity, and is widely used with projects such as Apache, Postgres and Samba. Samba3 as a domain controller properly requires OpenLDAP, which is very widely deployed in this way. Interoperability is about more than just protocols and code, it's about people. See how Apple interacted for developing OpenDirectory, as opposed to Novell's eDirectory development.
Flexible
OpenLDAP's internal architecture has encouraged contributions to do proxying, gatewaying and caching among other things. Better API accessibility should open the door to a lot more integration with systems that have never used LDAP before.
... and it only gets better :-)
