Show HN: OpenMetal – open-source first meld of private and public cloud

The phrase "open source" is mentioned repeatedly here, and in your https://openmetal.io/about-openmetal/guiding-principles/ but https://github.com/openmetalio seems to only be the docs and a simplistic search of them https://github.com/openmetalio/openmetal-docs/search?q=git+c...> doesn't cough up the open source-ness of OpenMetal

Is your pitch that you use open source first, or that you are open source first?

ed: I would actually really enjoy if https://docs.openstack.org/devstack/zed/guides/single-vm.htm... worked because moto only goes so far, whereas if I had the ability to actually do AWS-y stuff in a VM it would enable a lot more realistic tests than either localstack or moto offer I was inspired to actually try this again and it is now much better, and I'd go so far as to say it's now actually very cool

Which brings us back to your post: the website seems to be targeting so many different audiences, and at such differing levels of "hand waveiness" that it's hard to tell what problem paying you would solve. Is it just that you're taking the pain out of provisioning OpenStack and then good luck? Are you trying to take the localstack model of "open source, but operationalized" in order to add more surface area onto OpenStack (and then hopefully feeding those contributions back into OpenStack)?

Thanks for looking! and you got all the way to our guiding principles! Awesome.

Our spot in the OpenStack/Open Source ecosystem isn't code - and looks like it isn't clear enough - it is that we make the full open source version of OpenStack and Ceph available in an environment that is suited to those systems - not a test system, but a real multi server system.

It lets people experience OpenStack and Ceph before every having to take on architecting it - and the Ansible we used is available to them to either carry forward on our systems or for using it as the basis of anything they want to build.

These are both for paying customers and for people learning - we have set aside resources and in our business model to allow people to spin up and use the clusters so they can learn.

OpenStack and Ceph in real production is pretty hard to pull off - failure is really common and so what we are hoping is we can at least ease some of that.

We also help OpenStack itself by providing hardware for the Zuul dev pipelines.

As for who we sell to/make money/solve - these are usually mid-size companies spending between $30k and $100k per month on Cloud and we handle part of that spend. Usually because we can tune the cloud to their workload for better performance or because we are a better deal with better support than the local mega cloud...

Oh, wow, that does sound awesome, and thank you for taking the time to respond. Based on that, I am for sure in the target audience of folks who would like to learn more about how OpenStack works "for real."

I created an account, but it appears that the only offered 2FA options are SMS and email; any plans on supporting TOTP?

Also, regarding

> and the Ansible we used is available to them to either carry forward on our systems or for using it as the basis of anything they want to build.

I was expecting to find that behind the login wall, but did not. Is that something that eventually shows up on the "central" dashboard somewhere?

Speaking of that dashboard, I did eventually find the username for the nodes in the tutorial, but the inclusion of `root@` in front of the hostname can make that process a tiny bit smoother