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Intel Pulls Out of OpenStack Effort It Founded with Rackspace

fortune.com

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Re: Intel Pulls Out of OpenStack Effort It Founded with Rackspace

#21
post #13

the article mentions other big players pulling out or cutting jobs/funding related to OpenStack in recent months in addition to this latest move by Intel. Is this related to some endemic problem with the technology, big egos within the project, dominance by another outside player or what? Cursory searching doesn't reveal any "big thing". Maybe it's just dying a death by a thousand cuts.

I don't know about today, but a few years ago I tried to set it up and found it to be an uninstallable massive ball of twine and chewing gum. It was shockingly clunky. I can't imagine running something like that in production. I suppose it'd be good job security for a lot of sysadmins.

I just moved into an openstack development job, and I'm struggling. So many technologies and complexities you have to keep in mind, even within a single project. I'm hoping it comes together soon. I have not provided a ton of value yet just sitting here learning, and breaking so many things.

Re: Intel Pulls Out of OpenStack Effort It Founded with Rackspace

#22

Is there an alternative out there for OpenStack? Perhaps a minimalist version?

There are some, but in practice I suspect the real competition comes from the major public cloud services in one direction and from more traditional but tried-and-tested IT infrastructure in the other. So far, products aiming for the middle ground, like OpenStack, just haven't quite found their mark. After this much time and investment, in a market where potential is trumped by pragmatism, it's not surprising that major corporate backers might start to look elsewhere for their future strategy.

Re: Intel Pulls Out of OpenStack Effort It Founded with Rackspace

#23

the article mentions other big players pulling out or cutting jobs/funding related to OpenStack in recent months in addition to this latest move by Intel. Is this related to some endemic problem with the technology, big egos within the project, dominance by another outside player or what? Cursory searching doesn't reveal any "big thing". Maybe it's just dying a death by a thousand cuts.

Openstack created a lot of possibilities for the way it "could" work or "should" work, but almost no methods where it does work.

The problem with Openstack is it had too many moving parts, and no standard/reference implementation. It was destroyed by it's own grandiose goals. The project wanted to say 'yes' to every permutation of software. Making it a disaster from an operational standpoint. Everything promised, but nothing verified.

Re: Intel Pulls Out of OpenStack Effort It Founded with Rackspace

#24
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm at one of the only companies I know of outside Rackspace that's running it in production. We're doing a very poor job of it; we never hit production with any effort to upgrade the cluster in the past three years, so we're still running Havana with Nova Network. The most likely upgrade path for us right now is VMWare 6.5.

So are we. And so is another department in our org. Frankly, we're doing a piss poor job of it. Migrations don't happen even if manually ran, the compute nodes are already at capacity, even with the meagre VMs we use. I have kept pushing for Mesos myself. I see it as a good way forward. Openstack may be a technical good body of code... But in the end its too convoluted codebase and many moving parts to be effective i…

Mesos isn't really a direct replacement for Openstack, but you're probably still right to be pushing for it. If you roll with Mesos you will still need to solve a bunch of lower-level infrastructure challenges: machine provisioning, basic system config management, storage management (if you want persistent volumes), fancy networking (if you want ip-per-container or any sort of network isolation), and so on.

Like Openstack, Mesos brings its own set of new complications.

Unlike Openstack, Mesos almost always increases efficiency of operations once it's in use. Openstack always seems to result in more and more effort spent on just operating Openstack...

Re: Intel Pulls Out of OpenStack Effort It Founded with Rackspace

#25

the article mentions other big players pulling out or cutting jobs/funding related to OpenStack in recent months in addition to this latest move by Intel. Is this related to some endemic problem with the technology, big egos within the project, dominance by another outside player or what? Cursory searching doesn't reveal any "big thing". Maybe it's just dying a death by a thousand cuts.

Openstack was supposed to be a vendor based consultant bonanza. It wasn't designed by or for the users or customers, if it was designed at all.

Instead it was a vehicle for hardware vendors to sell compatible product and consultants to build something they'd have to service forever afterwards. (Yes this is a cynical and half joking take, but it's also serious)

So what went wrong? Welll, If you're not going to build a product that teams can actually figure out how to use, then you need to have Cisco or Oracle level sales talent behind it. OpenStack didn't have that, and maybe couldn't have it because there wasn't one boss company behind the product.

Like I mentioned, there is a trade-off between the usability and required Sales Power. As far as usability goes, even consultancies that were directed to use and sell OpenStack solutions couldn't get their people to figure it out. A consultancy based technology has to be coherent enough that a junior associate can reasonably start billing hours for it. OpenStack will stymie a close-knit team of veteran "devops" people— And I'm talking about people who actually know systems administration and development, not a buzz word ninja.

Re: Intel Pulls Out of OpenStack Effort It Founded with Rackspace

#26

Sites with autoplay videos should be banned.

I've recently started using this Chrome Plugin to disable autoplay: https://github.com/Eloston/disable-html5-autoplay. So far works about 95% of the time, but it recently became unmaintained. It also does not distinguish between when you click on a video and the next link plays it, e.g. Following a link to a YouTube Video or Netflix show.

Re: Intel Pulls Out of OpenStack Effort It Founded with Rackspace

#27
post #16
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I very much agree. Clicked link, read five words, site started screaming some garbage advertising at me, closed tab immediately. It's not even the video that bothers me so much - it's the autoplay audio that causes me to immediately close the tab and never return to a site. Ugh.

Yeah, I looked for another link that didn't have such obnoxious refuse... Id' be game if you can find a less spammy site. But when I submitted this an hour ago, there wasn't any.

For what it's worth, it's fortune.com that annoyed me, not your link to it. Thanks for looking for alternatives at least :-)

Re: Intel Pulls Out of OpenStack Effort It Founded with Rackspace

#28
From someone not very invested in the OpenStack process it feels like all the momentum of the recent push of the project just withered away all at once. I am not sure if the container crowd ate it's lunch, where containerized appliances just solve the problem of openstack better.

Re: Intel Pulls Out of OpenStack Effort It Founded with Rackspace

#29

the article mentions other big players pulling out or cutting jobs/funding related to OpenStack in recent months in addition to this latest move by Intel. Is this related to some endemic problem with the technology, big egos within the project, dominance by another outside player or what? Cursory searching doesn't reveal any "big thing". Maybe it's just dying a death by a thousand cuts.

Openstack created a lot of possibilities for the way it "could" work or "should" work, but almost no methods where it does work. The problem with Openstack is it had too many moving parts, and no standard/reference implementation. It was destroyed by it's own grandiose goals. The project wanted to say 'yes' to every permutation of software. Making it a disaster from an operational standpoint. Everything promised, but…

I second this many times. The APIs were so inconsistent. I had to go through many hooks just to get the data I wanted. Openstack is nice, but Openstack community tried to create an open AWS. The problem is, everything gets so modular and too many components to deploy just to get Openstack working.

It's a PaaS for IaaS foundation. Unless you have the resources to line up and support Openstack, I recommend just build on AWS/Google/Azure/Rackspace/Heroku/DigitalOcean, you name one.

I wonder if big customers such as Bloomberg ever regret / think of moving to public/private IaaS.

Re: Intel Pulls Out of OpenStack Effort It Founded with Rackspace

#30
post #2

I never saw a compan benefitting from openstack.

I'm at one of the only companies I know of outside Rackspace that's running it in production. We're doing a very poor job of it; we never hit production with any effort to upgrade the cluster in the past three years, so we're still running Havana with Nova Network. The most likely upgrade path for us right now is VMWare 6.5.

Do you work at eBay, because they run kubernetes ontop of openstack, which sounds a bit awful if you really think about it all.
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