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OpenStack: the Open Source Cloud That Vendors Love and Users Are Ignoring

Posted by Soulskill on from the not-enough-sexy-buzzwords dept.

Brandon Butler writes: "OpenStack has no shortage of corporate backers. Rackspace, Red Hat, IBM, Dell, HP, Cisco and many others have hopped on board. But many wonder, after four years, shouldn't there be more end users by this point? 'OpenStack backers say this progression is completely normal. Repeating an analogy many have made, Paul Cormier, president of products and technology for Red Hat, says OpenStack’s development is just like the process of building up Linux. This time the transition to a cloud-based architecture is an even bigger technological transformation than replacing proprietary operating systems with Linux. "It’s where Linux was in the beginning," he says about OpenStack's current status. "Linux was around for a while before it really got adopted in the enterprise. OpenStack is going through the same process right now."'"

8 of 99 comments (clear)

  1. You're talking about the cloud here by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The only people with the business case to use cloud infrastructure are the corporate backers themselves. SMB have no reason to chase clouds and mid-level B2B computing crap gets outsourced anyway.

    1. Re:You're talking about the cloud here by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The only people with the business case to use cloud infrastructure are the corporate backers themselves. SMB have no reason to chase clouds and mid-level B2B computing crap gets outsourced anyway.

      Yeah, because your typical SMB out there really want to use time and resources on managing their own IT systems, administrating their own servers and perform regular updates and security patching. It's not like they really want to focus on something else.. I know it is popular to make fun of the cloud hype on Slashdot, but IT as a managed services has real value especially for SMB (not at least compared to a very typical SMB scenario of the IT role being filled part time by the guy in the firm that knows most about computers and stuff)

    2. Re:You're talking about the cloud here by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      As a IT manager of a 1000 user mid tier business, The only thing we could do in the cloud was Email and office docs.
      Neither os which tied into our document management solution that was a business requirement, so using cloud apps was not appropriate for them, nor for the other 200 or so productivity apps we use.

      putting the Servers in the cloud as virts is possible. but 2 times the cost of physicals, and I still have to manage them there anyway:-).

  2. Of course vendors love it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Cloud computing companies fuck their customers with excessive charges orders of magnitude higher than normal data-center co-location costs.

    The reason why people are ignoring it is because they recognize the ass fucking. Simple really.

  3. it boggles the mind... by Connie_Lingus · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ...that right now, in the midst of the NSA security nightmare and all the angst and FUD it's causing, that people are wondering why individuals are not deciding to throw their often-sensitive data into the cloud.

    how could anyone think their data will be or stay safe, given the various threats that we hear about on almost a daily basis?

    timing is everything (besides location of course...and sex appeal...and everything else) in life, and right now is not the time for cloud computing.

    --
    never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
  4. Ignoring all the other problems with "clouds"... by nctritech · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ...until upstream bandwidth in the USA catches up with the rest of the world, self-hosted "clouds" like this are just not happening. Sure, you can colocate a server, but that's expensive for a SMB and you can spend that same money on a bigger Internet pipe instead, but with such cheap turn-key on-demand scaling services like EC2, why set up your own?

  5. Lot more than you think... by TemporalBeing · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There's many more OpenStack users and operators than you think. OpenStack is good for small cloud vendors, people that want to run a private, in-house cloud. It's good for Universities that want to teach Cloud computing, or enthusiests that want to try setting up their own private cloud for toying with.

    OpenStack holds a summit every 6 months. This last one (just last week) had over 3500 people in attendence - developers from those sponsoring it, operators, and user; and they were talking about how phenominal the growth has been - the first from what I heard had like 500 people.

    So while you may want to use AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Compute for a non-managed, public cloud; if you want to do something in-house, you have fewer choices. VMware certainly has their offering; but it also comes at a high price (yes, I've looked at it in the past). I'm not sure where the various hypervisor support is, but I do know they use KVM and have the ability to use others (Rackspace uses Xen, others use VMware or Windows HyperV if I am not mistaken; at the very least there's discussion on it).

    Now, I wouldn't expect high growth for OpenStack. Why? It's a big budget item to run in-house, and most are probably not going to market they use it. If people are not devoting a lot of money up-front to run it, they may be testing and slowly rolling it out as resources allow. And yes, you can run it from the SMB level to the Enterprise level.

    Disclaimer: I work for Rackspace; I've got a few servers that I may try to install OpenStack on to play with myself as well.

    --
    Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
  6. Not necessarily ignoring... by nine-times · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'm not sure what they mean by "end users". I've been keeping an eye on OpenStack, and it seems to be useful for developing cloud applications, but I might be missing the point a little. So are we calling developers of large-scale applications "end users"?

    I don't think people are ignoring it, but as far as I know, OpenStack doesn't really service your standard network IT market yet, and it's not really something that will service "end users" as I think of them. It seems to be something to provide scalability for development, but if you're a developer working on a large application, it's often smarter to go with a vendor rather than trying to build your own infrastructure. That means that they go with AWS or Rackspace or something.

    So my question is, who do you expect to be implementing OpenStack other than cloud providers (e.g. Rackspace) and a relatively small number of companies looking to build their own cloud infrastructure?

    As an IT guy (not a developer), the whole thing is still pretty unclear. What would I use OpenStack for? If I wanted to test it out, what would I need to get started? How would I set it up? What, then could I do with it? Most of the appeal of "the cloud" at this point is the potential to divest myself of responsibility for its maintenance. The only people that I can imagine making use of OpenStack are large companies with large public, business critical web applications, and even then only those who, for whatever reason, don't want to use AWS or Rackspace or some other vendor, and have the resources to build and maintain a bunch of cloud infrastructure. Yes, there are businesses that fit that description, but it's not a large percentage of businesses.

    And I'm not sure I'd call them "end users".