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Intel Pulls Out of OpenStack Effort It Founded with Rackspace

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

#51

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 figure Intel's participation was hinged on supporting a growing fleet of competitors to AWS, who would bid up chip prices. I guess that isn't happening. IMO, OpenStack was sort of a consortium effort to compete with VMWare, AWS and Salesforce, but it's operational model is closest to AWS. Nearly all the big enterprise IT companies tied their rafts together hoping to stave the flow of customers. It doesn't appear to…

Check out their front page: https://www.rackspace.com/

Their own cloud isn't mentioned on it. They've obviously been putting their eggs in the consultancy basket for 6 months now,

Hell, even if you go to cloud in the menu, they're only advertising other clouds: https://www.rackspace.com/cloud You have to go through the 'Infrastructure' menu to find their own cloud offerings.

I'm wondering how long before we get notice we need to migrate away from them due to impending shutdowns.

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

#52

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/

They have an interest in a large server ecosystem in general, with options for running your own infrastructure, because it's a lot more profitable for them to sell server CPUs to many companies that don't have as much options to pressure them on price as e.g. Amazon can, and to get their special features integrated so they can use them as arguments against other CPU vendors. They don't care as much which option wins, so it makes sense to be involved with anything that seems important.

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

#53

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 figure Intel's participation was hinged on supporting a growing fleet of competitors to AWS, who would bid up chip prices. I guess that isn't happening. IMO, OpenStack was sort of a consortium effort to compete with VMWare, AWS and Salesforce, but it's operational model is closest to AWS. Nearly all the big enterprise IT companies tied their rafts together hoping to stave the flow of customers. It doesn't appear to…

You missed Red Hat, who seem to be the only company having major success with OpenStack [1]

Most of IBM, Intel, HPE etc have thrown in the towel and now offer their own services on top of Red Hat OpenStack.

OpenStack has now found itself beyond enterprise, and now being the de-facto platform for NFV running mobile networks, and I guess Red Hat are becoming the winner here as they are so used to supporting an OpenStack 'type of' infrastructure for large bodies such as banking, telco, health etc. When you consider Red Hat are already large well established contributors to all of the layers of the OpenStack 'stack' such as KVM/QEMU , libvirt, the kernel itself, + overlay networking tech such as OVS, and now DPDK, you can see why they are well positioned to support and run OpenStack clouds.

[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/28/red_hat_cloud_quart...

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

#54
post #7
post #2

I never saw a compan benefitting from openstack.

att runs it in-house and they seem to like it.

I was at their keynote in one of the Openstack summit. I can guarantee that at least the VP that spoke about it knows nothing about openstack, and were just using Mirantis to deploy. They just threw Buzzwords around, one of which was Fuel[0]

[0]: https://www.mirantis.com/software/openstack/fuel/

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

#55

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 figure Intel's participation was hinged on supporting a growing fleet of competitors to AWS, who would bid up chip prices. I guess that isn't happening. IMO, OpenStack was sort of a consortium effort to compete with VMWare, AWS and Salesforce, but it's operational model is closest to AWS. Nearly all the big enterprise IT companies tied their rafts together hoping to stave the flow of customers. It doesn't appear to…

Yeah, the first advertisement I heard for Rackspace's consultancy service for AWS was a bit of a shock. Having heard it, I'd assume that they're pulling away from their own cloud-based service offerings at some point.

Just conjecture on my part, but I would have serious reservations about that part of their service catalog right now if I was vendor shopping.

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

#56
post #38

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.

OpenStack is a platform for creating an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). So it's running on some physical machines, and manages your physical machines to slice into VMs. There you get to manage / create networks, storage, etc. Basically running a private cloud in your own datacenter/basement/office. Openstack has grown more than just compute. It has a supposedly compatible interface for S3 an object storage system…

[deleted]

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

#57
post #2

I never saw a compan benefitting from openstack.

I have seen several successful implementations in the 18 months I've been working with OpenStack. There are definitely gotchas and low level (driver, hardware)issues you have to deal with. I never thought I would be so familiar with IPMI.

That said, OpenStack is an ambitious product. It essentially seeks to give you a lot of the functionality of AWS, except with on-premise infrastructure. That is a tall order. AWS is a multi-billion dollar effort that I assume has has far more engineers than the OpenStack project.

OpenStack is a complex solution to a very complex problem. Having worked with other commercial IaaS solutions, I will say I hands down prefer OpenStack to the others I've worked with.

If there is a private cloud solution that delivers the same/similar functionality of OpenStack with less admin overhead and more simplicity, then I want to hear about it.

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

#58
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.

Are you using TripleO/Red Hat Platform Director? Can you share the size of your OpenStack environment?

When you say VMware 6.5, are you referring to ESXi aka vSphere Hypervisor? That is not a 1 for 1 replacement of OpenStack.

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

#59
OpenStack really has a bunch of problems.

The big one is that OpenStack is about building and operating your own Rackspace; this is not something IT organizations can even hire for let alone carry off. The idea that they could/would/should was purely aspirational.

The others are that it's basically a mess - no two OS deployments will look the same - and that it has neither an operational advantage nor too much of a pricing advantage (50% for RHAT) over VMware - which is better integrated and much, much better from a admin experience and debuggability standpoint.

I looked hard at leveraging OpenStack for the service we were building but the underlying code was often cringetastic and somewhat naive. At some level if you run software as a service you can work around poor code quality - something friends from AWS have emphasized - but you can't throw it over the wall and have other people without large engineering staffs there to help run it - which doesn't work in the small. VMware is the opposite approach - the entire model and practices evolved out of arm's reach software sales and support. So naturally it works better.

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

#60
post #49
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenStack is a platform for creating an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). So it's running on some physical machines, and manages your physical machines to slice into VMs. There you get to manage / create networks, storage, etc. Basically running a private cloud in your own datacenter/basement/office. Openstack has grown more than just compute. It has a supposedly compatible interface for S3 an object storage system…

Absolutely. You get it. It's frustrating to read people comparing container technologies or worse container schedulers with OpenStack. Apples and oranges. If you are planning on running containers on premise you need something from managing the IAAS side of things. OpenStack is excellent at IAAS and is the foundation for running higher level abstractions and services on top.

I said elsewhere in the thread. If there is a better IaaS solution than OpenStack, then I would love to know about it.

I disagree with you that you need an IaaS solution to run containers on-prem, but realistically, yes you do need an IaaS solution

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