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Gartner: OpenStack Lacks Clarity
An anonymous reader writes with a quick bite from El Reg: "The OpenStack open-source project has come in for criticism from a Gartner analyst because the claims made by companies frequently don't line up with reality. In a forthright post published on Tuesday Gartner analyst and research director Alessandro Perilli chided the OpenStack community for a lack of clarity, lack of transparency, lack of vision, and lack of pragmatism."
An OpenStack developer disagrees, and instead suggests that the perceived lack of clarity is just a result of the open development process. You just don't get to see which Amazon cloud projects fail since they are hidden behind the corporate wall.
What's not clear or pragmatic about the project goal of taking over the world?
Here's your quarterly dividend check, monsieur.
Clearly, OpenStack did not pay Gartner enough.
Just order some more analysis & deep insights, at the right treshold it will become all positive.
OpenStack is a bit of a mess with way too many interdependent moving parts that seem to be upgraded and replaced at a pace that makes one's head spin. I can't even keep track of all the project codenames any more. I do think it's slowly getting better but I think have a lot of work to do to make it simpler and easier to setup and manage.
I'm involved in OpenStack and my initial conclusion is that Gartner is completely wrong. It doesn't have a lack of clarity, it has none and in general is just a giant fucking mess of haphazard spaghetti code that you can _probably_ make work (in a large corporation, not on your closet server) if you put 50 good developers on it and have 100 other people to support the environment.
They have 90 little pieces, each with their own completely different way of doing shit. It's all a mishmash of Python and assorted scripts.
It's the new cool kid, though. A lot of people have sipped the kool-aid.
Gartner "study" disparages product competing with study's funder? Shocked! Simply Shocked!
If it helps, corporate software is absolutely just as terrible.
Gartner is nothing more than a PR company for whoever pays for their 'analysis'.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
There's a difference, which is that most crappy corporate software isn't attempting to define standards and a platform for everyone else to build on top of. OpenStack claims to be developing a vendor-agnostic standard and reference implementation for interoperable systems.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Its funny, I would apply almost all those same vague criticisms to Gartner.
I wish people would just quick subscribing to the pay to play crap opinion pieces they try to pass off as research. Its painful obvious to anyone who actually has to /use/administer/support/deploy an IT product where it falls in the "magic quadrant" has more to do with the market cap of the company behind it, that the products own merits.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
The very nature of OpenStack is pretty clear. If you have any questions about "clarity", go download the source code and set it up for yourself and setup your own VPDC.
Really? Have you seen Azure? I don't mean "scoffed and dismissed it without knowing shit about it" like many would do.
It works very well and provides a _shitload_ of features, both PaaS and IaaS.
All the closed services are scared as hell, and paying out the nose for "studies" to make them look better.
A Gartner Analyst attacked something for 'lacking clarity' and 'claims that frequently don't line up with reality'? Please give me a moment to collect my jaw from the floor and restore it to its operating location.
I'm not sure I've ever seen such a bold example of un-selfawareness...
I find frequent upgrades is better than buggy, under-featured 'enterprise' software that is not updated (as in fixed) for years.
This was my impression, too. OpenStack has a lot of potential, but look at the way a "competitor" like Apache's CloudStack is presented, and the documentation and UIs for configuring OpenStack do seem to be much less developed if there's much there at all. There's an interesting comparison here, though it is more than a year old now.
Still, I doubt the timing of these comments on the Gartner blog are coincidental, given the pressure the big networking hardware companies have been under and the threat to them that SDN represents.
For example, Cisco's stock price has been crashing for some time, and things like blowing a billion-dollar deal with Amazon aren't helping their prospects or, presumably, their share price. The same site (it's Business Insider, so apply your own level of confidence in anything they say) describes Cisco's response as 'a confusing array of products named "Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI)"', but one thing we do know ACI is that much of it will be unavailable until next year.
I have no insider knowledge of who might have "encouraged" this particular set of comments from Gartner, but Big Networking is probably a fairly regular "customer", so I have at least one plausible theory. :-)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
"This can't be a good technology because they didn't pay us to write the paper. fortunately, our friends did."
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Openstack is immature, and the project not very cohesive. He is right that the networking in neutron is way behind where it needs to be. However I don't see a lot of alternatives if you run a large cloud with unique requirements. You can use Amazon, but then you have to ask how much you trust Amazon's cloud. You can spend a lot of money and buy VMWare, but you are locked in with VMWare's enterprise specific focus.
Oh No! Really! Thats terrible. We better pay some 'analyst firm' to write some FUD denouncing it.
Oh wait...
I've always noticed a Gartner bias towards what it's subscription customers - the large corporate IT shops - want to hear. Back in the day when mainframes were dominant, Gartner' s predictions for the UNIX market were always way to low so that the mainframers would remain confident that they were still using the right technology. I was in a mainframe shop, pushing UNIX, and had access to Gartner. Each quarter, when they produced their once-again ridiculously low predictions for the market, there was never any acknowledgement of how the previous quarter's estimates we so off the mark.
Now we have the same situation with VMWare and related management tools. The big IT shops have poured a fortune into training their people and documenting their procedures. It doesn't matter how good KVM and OpenStack are. Gartner tells them this new-fangled stuff is still too risky. So their customers are happy and stick with the status quo.
If you have the chance, go back and look at what Gartner has condescendingly pontificated on as "inevitable" over the years. Gartner's track record is abysmal. If they were a stockbroker, you'd make a mint just by being contrarian to their advice.
I love how "a Gartner analyst" is so often used to attempt to convey an aura of legitimacy that would otherwise not exist.
J. Random Hobo, a Gartner analyst, released a white paper study pontificating on the reduced efficacy of khakis found in the Goodwill dumpster to conceal urine stains, as opposed to the more desirable brown corduroys.
I love Gartner reports. I have had a 25 year technology career based on doing the opposite of what the say.
Working out nicely BTW
Want some entertainment?
Google the terms: gartner shill
My favorite response: "Giant Liar-for-Rent"
"The difference between these two cloud giant is that everything OpenStack does, it does in the open. All our successes and failures are in the open.
"The OpenStack community is an awesome software factory which has an awe-inspiring process for managing releases with a continuous integration, source code management, peer review tools so much so that one of its community members has packaged up the process itself as a product offering." ref
If we had "funders" for our blogs, I'd be able to buy a lot more of those nice tin foil hats you're wearing.
There is another difference, which I think is more relevant to Gartner's report. Most crappy corporate software comes with glossy sales brochures written at a level that even an analyst can understand.
I see a lot of ad hominem attacks on Gartner here but I'm actually interested in this topic - where are the factual rebuttals of what this analyst said?