Slashdot Mirror
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?
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)
So in other words, it's exactly like a commercial package, except the support staff are on your payroll rather than someone else's, so you actually get something set for your needs rather than whatever the salesman was pushing.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
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
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.
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...
Typical techie response which lacks insight into the needs of the rest of the world...
Not that I am defending Gartner - they are a marketing company which publishes positions based on who has paid them money - but the whole "just get the source code and ..." thinking demonstrates a basic lack of understanding for the rest of the world. It is just as bad and just as myopic as Gartner is.
I find frequent upgrades is better than buggy, under-featured 'enterprise' software that is not updated (as in fixed) for years.
It doesn't have a lack of clarity, it has none
It probably doesn't help that at least one of those involved lack an understanding of the word "lack."
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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.
Really? AWS and Azure are "giant fucking messes of haphazard spaghetti code that you can _probably_ make work in a large corporation if you put 50 good developers on it and have 100 other people to support the environment?"
You sure about that?
Because those are the commercial packages that do what OpenStack does - and having used both of them, they're pretty goddamned solid.
Where can I download that thing called AWS and Azure to install on my private cloud?
"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?
Why use experts that are already familiar with a product when you can spend money trying to get your own group of people up to speed?
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
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.
Fail. You can use both on your private cloud.
Egg Fucking Zactly. Someone else who understands. Everyone wants to reinvent the wheel.
Soon the "cloud" will be as commodity as the "OS". Most companies use distributions of Linux or they use Windows, they don't download millions of lines of shitty, disjointed Python code.
Let people specialize. When you can download OpenStack and easily get it up and running in a real enterprise without a shitload of people do painstakingly slave over it, I'll take it seriously.
Really, can I download all the management tools that Amazon uses in AWS? If you tell me that I can use Xen and other OSS code that Amazon uses will only tell me you don't get what I am talking about
Everyone wants to reinvent the wheel.
As the wise once said:
(rickest) reinventing the wheel is exactly what allows us to travel 80mph without even feeling it. the original wheel fell apart at about 5mph after 100 yards. now they're rubber, self-healing, last 4000 times longer. whoever intended the phrase "you're reinventing the wheel" to be an insult was an idiot.
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.
VPC is just a clipped off segment of Amazon's cloud. I don't see the offer of the software such that I could build my own private version of their cloud.
"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.
Really, can I download all the management tools that Amazon uses in AWS? If you tell me that I can use Xen and other OSS code that Amazon uses will only tell me you don't get what I am talking about
A lot of those tools are just shell scripts of middling complexity. Likewise with the web admin apps. It's not trivial, but I could whip out some PHP to drive the shell scripts in - well, not an hour, but probably less than a week for the most important functions.
Then again, I'm used to administering Xen from its primitives, so for me that's mostly just automating stuff I've done many times before.
please.... home clouds can be just as much a proof of concept as an enterprise cloud. how much do you put into it is what counts
Shirley you can't be serious.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
Your definition of "reinvention" differs strongly from mine.
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.