31–40 of 118 posts
I never saw a compan benefitting from openstack.
We're running Openstack with Kubernetes and it's working quite well. Lots of challenges though, and we're just exiting a preview phase into production.
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…
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 believe the decline of OpenStack is inherent in the type of technology. I don't believe that type of "infrastructure plumbing" software lends itself to high-speed high-quality innovation in the "open source" model. Some reasons:
1) it's boring infrastructure software: Because it is software for "data center" infrastructure, it's not glamorous and interesting enough to attract programmers who don't interact with that world. Other successful open source projects like LAME MP3, ffmpeg, Linux kernel, etc have programmers that can experiment on laptops and ordinary users that can download and play with it.
2) no abundant source of high-quality code contributions: The enhancements you want contributed into OpenStack should be provided companies running complex private cloud operations. They would battle-test the code and that knowledge would trickle down into the open source contributions.
However, a company that's facing the prospects of a complex private cloud would more likely choose Amazon AWS or Google Compute platforms instead of tackling OpenStack.[1] This removes a subset of potential OpenStack contributers. OpenStack is so complex to run/customize/maintain that it requires building up an internal staff with skills similar to AWS/Google/Facebook's datacenter engineers.
If the company does decide to run OpenStack, it's likely they won't contribute back any source code. (Same as Linux situation where most users of it don't contribute source code.) This removes another subset of potential contributors.
Probably the best "private cloud operating systems" are developed by Google/Facebook/Amazon/MS for their own datacenters and those 4 companies are not contributing to OpenStack. Wal-mart has sophisticated datacenter operations and they may be the largest Openstack user but their contributions to OpenStack do not match the new innovations of AWS mentioned at re:Invent[2] or Google CloudNext[3]. Yes, Red Hat is a sponsor of OpenStack but their internal cloud operations are not stressed like AWS/Azure/GCP with customer-facing challenges nor do they manage IT complexity like Wal-Mart.
Sometimes, commercial versions of plumbing software do lose to open source projects. One example would be Microsoft's Dryad "distributed computing" losing to open source Hadoop even though MS had a 7 year headstart. However, Hadoop+HDFS is still not as fast or reliable as Google's internal distributed mapreduce. (Maybe the idea of buying a hundred expensive Windows Server licenses to satisfy a 100-node Dryad cluster contributed to the market ignoring it.)
Based on history of how certain open source projects fall behind proprietary counterparts (such as OpenCL not as cutting edge performance as NVIDIA CUDA or OpenGL not matching MS DirectX features[4]), OpenStack seems on to on a similar trajectory of "not as good as the proprietary alternative".
At this point in time, the "private cloud OS" space is moving very fast (possibly faster than flavor-of-the-month Javascript frameworks!) and the open source development model is not able to keep up.
[1] http://www.computerworlduk.com/cloud-computing/guardian-goes...
[2] https://aws.amazon.com/new/reinvent/
[3] https://blog.google/topics/google-cloud/100-announcements-go...
[4] https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/6054...
Is there any chance that vendors (like Intel) will care less about the API for accessing their products, as there seems to be more consolidation around API's for running applications like Kubernetes. Intel is a member of the CNCF [1] and seems to be putting money behind it. Am I reading too much into that and is Intel just a big company that puts money in lots of places? [1]: https://www.cncf.io/about/members/
With the slowdown of single threaded scaling Intel knows that performance improvements for consumers in the near future will be increasingly anemic. Servers and ML are two spaces where increasing core counts still makes sense.
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.
Please. You seem to be making the same mistake, that many make on blogs and news websites, of exclaiming "containers are the future!" while both VMs and containers have their place and use-cases.
I'd rather suggest you read the below. (Since I'm linking to a blog, quick background about the author: Rich is one of the long-time contributors of KVM-based Virtualization stack and the lead author / maintainer of libguestfs.org)
https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2013/06/19/the-boring-truth-full-...
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.
Is there an alternative out there for OpenStack? Perhaps a minimalist version?
Unlike Openstack, it has a proper scheduler, and lets you rebalance VMs across hypervisors efficiently. Also unlike Openstack, it can restart VMs if it (or the hypervisor) dies, if you've enabled that.
And completely orthogonal to Openstack, it has very strong consistency guarantees. It's not made to start 1000s of VMs in seconds, since each master node has to agree on all decisions, and each operation typically "locks" the involved hypervisor. On the other hand, I haven't been able to break it once in over six years.
Note that it really just exposes an API and comes with a superb command-line client. Some assembly required.
Source: deployed Ganeti with great success at a billion-euro company, moved on to promising "cloud" project which insisted on using Openstack and promptly quit after a year of fighting obscure bugs (and naive colleagues who did not want to try anything else :)).
(If you'd like help deploying it, I'm available!)
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.
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…
Visible also in things like the installation process (which for ages didn't have an "official" answer, so you had pay one of the big vendors to do it if you didn't want to try automate it yourself)