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OpenStack: the Open Source Cloud That Vendors Love and Users Are Ignoring
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."'"
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.
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.
If I want to host my own, I get VMware in my own datacenter. If I want to host in the cloud, I buy storage+compute from AWS. I see no reason to deploy OpenStack at a small to medium sized business. Am I just looking to get myself fired for insisting on a solution that is not VMware?
...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.
...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?
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)
OpenStack is more about virtualisation than anything else. Its potential usefulness for "cloud" service providers is one example, but it's probably of more interest to large organisations looking to consolidate their own in-house IT services. As with many "open" technologies, the realities aren't quite as simple as the article here suggests, though.
It's certainly true that proprietary high-end networking gear and virtualisation software can be expensive. In that respect, alternatives like OpenStack are potentially disruptive.
On the other hand, ask anyone who's actually had to administer an OpenStack system how they feel about it, and the response might be a string of curse words that would make your mother blush. This is a technology (or more accurately, a loosely connected family of technologies) still very much in its infancy, and sometimes it shows.
Also, just because big name brands are keen to be associated with the shiny new buzzword, don't mistake that for sincere support. OpenStack poses a direct threat to the established business model of some of those networking giants, and just like everyone else, the executives at those businesses are wondering where the industry is going next and how to look like you're playing nicely while really still trying to optimise your own financial position.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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".
To really make use of the cloud, don't put traditional apps on it. It is not designed to run things like MS Exchange.
If you work in a software development shop, especially a web app, then cloud is awesome. Think of cloud as an API. That is where the real power is!
We have a continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline. The entire deployment is described in software using Amazon's API. We abstract our infrastructure as code so we can replace it with Openstack if we need to. Amazon's API far ahead of anything else out there, so right now we don't really need to switch. This system is extremely powerful. We can bring up entire testing environments the the execution of a script. In system configuration is driven with Chef, but even some of those scripts use the Amazon API to help discover information about the environment.
VMWare provides some of the features, but nothing like Amazon offers. VMWare is also designed for a traditional IT cycle where you can about running a VM for more than a year. Cloud thinking makes more using of disposable nodes. A machine may not last a month because it is replaced with an entirely new image.
So, IF you write software correctly, having an in-house cloud API is extremely useful. Having a cloud API that a standard is also very useful. Start small with a public provider (Rackspace), then bring in-house as the business grows (RedHat Openstack). When the business needs somethings more elastic, that same API can be used with third party providers to supply the computing when it is demanded (Rackspace).
Cloud API's are new. Give it time.
Hell, lets even ignore all that. What would I, as an end user, use OpenStack for? I'm sincerely asking: what is the use case for an end user directly using OpenStack?
That, I think is the answer to TFA's question. You shouldn't. That's for the DevOps people to worry about.
As an end user, you shouldn't have to care what the data center underpinnings are. And for personal systems, the standardized images of cloud systems aren't much use. Although if you're running a call center or some other group where lots of people are running essentially identical systems, they're a better candidate for commodity virtual hosting.
Well I have, and even with RedHat's documentation and distribution, it's nothing short of a nightmare.
It took me a good part of a day to subscribe to RedHat's evaluation distribution, and configure maybe 2 out of the 7 or so daemons that are needed to get it to all hang together.... and this was starting from scratch with no idea how the open stack architecture hangs together. In fact, I'm still a bit fuzzy on the details.
Compare that with a vmware ESXi install. Within an hour or so, you're running linux in a VM.
For a contractor going into an organization trying to sell this, it's very very hard. Skilled people in Open stack are few. I can't easily set something up in Open Stack and then walk away, or the customer is in a lurch for support. The technology needs to be well supported and well understood with a community of techs.
At the moment, while I love open source and everything you can do with it, a typical organization would rather go with vmware due to it's ease of use and the number of techs that can manipulate it. Yes it costs a fortune, but it's worth paying because it's easier to support, and these enterprises have money for this.
Openstack is going to go great guns where in-house techs can deploy it for customers, and spend all the time in the world to learn it's ins and outs....but for everyone else it's too much hassle.
The comparisons with earlier version of Linux are apt. Just as enterprises don't want to roll their own Linux kernel, much less do enterprises want to hand configure their own cloud.
There will be a market for preconfigured & value-added open stack environments however. It's just too early to call yet.
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My experience as an end-user in a research project:
I've tried to install OpenStack on a small group of 4 machines (a controller, a network manager and two compute node). It was a real mess to install. The documentation contains omissions and mistakes. You need to write your own shell scripts to get the work done (and redone). Understanding what went wrong from the cryptic python debug messages is like banging your head against a wall. The only way I finally was able to test things was to scale back to a "one-node" system (everything on the same machine) and use DevStack. That works great but it's really far from a "cloud". You need to be HP or RackSpace to get this working well I guess.
Contrast that with OpenNebula. This platform is much less hyped about but it works much better. Even when you hit a bump on the road, you can actually understand the logs, and even debug stuff yourself. I got a 4 node system working with all storage on iSCSI and I can add more compute nodes seamlessly.