Intel Pulls Out of OpenStack Effort It Founded with Rackspace

This seems to get back to an interesting discussion I had with someone early in the OpenStack efforts: as a developer OpenStack doesn't directly interest me because I don't care about infrastructure. Where OpenStack had a possibility to win was to provide options for infrastructure agnosticism: if I can build an app that runs "unmodified" on any OpenStack-based infrastructure, that has a possibility to save me potential time and money from having to port apps to/from/between AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, et al (assuming of course that it enough clouds actually adopt).

From that perspective, container solutions are delivering a better developer proposition than OpenStack has yet managed. There are ways now to build container clusters that you can ship in parallel to AWS and Azure with very little code difference.

In that earlier discussion I was skeptical of OpenStack precisely because of its focus on infrastructure first. Without the buy in of being a clone for a specific cloud structure (AWS compatibility over anything else, for instance) or the backing of traditional datacenter/server vendors (IBM who eventually started into BlueMix; Microsoft whose "on premises Azure" is now firing on most cylinders but was announced as a plan early in OpenStack's history), OpenStack didn't seem to have an obvious niche in the infrastructure world. The closest to a niche it might have had in its early life was the promise of application portability between clouds and that never quite seemed to be delivered.

I can tell it frustrates infrastructure folks to hear that containers have been eating OpenStack's lunch, but that is the very real case from the developer perspective. As a developer today, I go for containers and OpenStack is no longer relevant on my radar. Sure I can run containers on OpenStack, but containers abstract away more of the infrastructure and I have less and less care what cloud(s) is underneath the container cluster. When I asked OpenStack people what OpenStack might deliver to me that vision of application portability was tantalizing but never seemed quite finished; container technologies have actually delivered that.

I worked for a company (Nobis Technology Group) that was acquired by LeaseWeb USA; I was a part of the "server automation" team and was somewhat reluctantly "forced out" of the team after the transition (they basically offered to pay me a smaller salary to work for them - do I look stupid?).

The team was essentially dissolved several months later, as I knew it would be.

But for the short period I was there (about 2 years), it was a great place to work, and a high point in my total career. Prior to that position, I had been doing web development in PHP pretty much exclusively. Doing server automation was a completely new space to me.

Soon after starting, our team was tasked with a migration to OpenStack. Since our current infrastructure front-end was already based on PHP, I got tasked with looking into how or if we could use PHP OpenCloud to work with OpenStack. It seemed workable to me; I was able to extend the classes in such a way using namespaces and other techniques so that we could add additional capabilities to the interface that weren't already supported (and there were a lot of holes to fill!), but wouldn't break things if/when we had to upgrade OpenCloud (this was ultimately tested a couple times I was there, and the changes proved flawless - at least on the PHP side).

Ultimately, we had a nice stable front-end that worked well with both our original system (some VM architecture that I forget) and the new "cloud" infrastructure based around OpenStack. In effect, a user could deploy either an actual server (if available), provision a VM (if a server was available), or build a cloud server "system" from a myriad of parts (we tried to support and provide as much access to the OpenStack stuff as we could). We also had a RESTful API for clients to also used (some of our clients resold our services under their own names). Some of the backend stuff was a bit "messy" in how it worked (I won't go into details, but I "authored" a fake "O'Reilly" "book" (really just a front "cover" mainly) whose mascot was dickbutt) - but despite the mess, overall it worked well, considering all the moving parts (where it would tend to fall down - not always, but enough - was when an upgrade to OpenStack was performed).

In short - we were also one of the few companies running OpenStack in production. Our owners ended up selling to LeaseWeb, I left - but the idea was that LeaseWeb wanted to transition things to their API and system, and I honestly don't know what happened with all the work and such I was involved in on the PHP side of things (there was also a point where me and a coworker had to quickly ramp up and learn GoLang to make an interface from Rancher/Docker over to the Nobis API - that was a fun and interesting experience). I imagine that some portion is still running, but who knows.

I personally think that in the right hands and with the right infrastructure OpenStack can be a very workable and working technology. It seemed to work well for the systems we used while I was at Nobis. I don't know honestly whether you could use it to scale up to anything like AWS or Google's offerings, but I think for medium-sized stuff like we were doing (or like Digital Ocean does - who at the time was our direct competition), it can work well - at least as I experienced things.

> It seems their big push is cloudfoundry, which seems to be more about containers and k8s.

Cloud Foundry is built on technologies that predate k8s, but yes, containerisation is the unit of operational currency.

Insofar as Dell EMC has a multi-play, it also includes Pivotal, which is the leading contributor to Cloud Foundry. Unsurprisingly it runs smoothly on VMWare, as well as AWS, GCP, Azure, OpenStack and I forget what else.

Disclosure: I work on Cloud Foundry on behalf of Pivotal.

> if I can build an app that runs "unmodified" on any OpenStack-based infrastructure, that has a possibility to save me potential time and money from having to port apps to/from/between AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, et al (assuming of course that it enough clouds actually adopt).

OpenStack is at the same layer as AWS, GCP or Azure. It's not an abstraction over them -- that's a PaaS. I'm not sure OpenStack was ever seriously intended to work at that level.

I work on a platform, Cloud Foundry, which provides the kind of portability you're talking about. Red Hat have OpenShift, which is another such platform.

Disclosure: I work on Cloud Foundry on behalf of Pivotal.