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Another One Bites the Dust: Cisco Discontinues Its $1B Cloud Initiative as AWS, Azure and Others Expand (geekwire.com)
Cisco will abandon its InterCloud cloud-computing offering on March 31 and will move any InterCloud workloads to other, unnamed cloud providers, including "in some cases, public cloud." From a report on GeekWire: Cisco's pull-back from the cloud scene marks the latest example of smaller participants -- many of them hardware-makers -- bailing in the face of huge growth by Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, and to some extent by Google Cloud, IBM and other, smaller public-cloud services. Hewlett-Packard in 2015 abandoned its efforts to be a public-cloud company. Then, Hewlett-Packard Enterprises essentially shut down its much-ballyhooed Helion cloud offering earlier this year. VMware still offers its vCloud Air hybrid-cloud service, though it has agreed to partner with AWS, which it once viewed as its arch-rival for cloud workloads. "We do not expect any material customer issues as a result of this transition," Cisco said in response to a request for comment. "For the last several months, we have been evolving our cloud strategy and our service provider partners are aware of this."
Its a little off topic but its got to be said. Servers that do every single conceivable out of band management thing in the world. I blame dell for this, but Cisco has taken it to a whole new level. Weve had IPMI and SOL over BMC for sixteen glorious years, and thats worked fine to ditch the console servers and the overpriced intelligent power wips in the datacenter. But cisco's UCM blade platform is a fever dream of browser based garbage designed to configure everything from the servers network IP and route, to inventory and asset management. im sure this is great if your datacenter is a single vendor, but in real datacenters there are about two dozen of these kinds of products in constant battle with eachother. Each has their own plugin, interface, configuration workflow and god help us configuration language. Ciscos UCM is a committee based piece of garbage.
in the real world this is nothing more than firmware-based bloatware. it frankly drives me away from buying from these vendors that cant just deliver the hardware as they always have without engaging in some value-added fart huffing contest to see who can create the biggest branded cockup. Vendors should take note that all this garbage just gets shut off and ignored in favour of IPMI and Salt/Chef/Ansible/a sensible configuration management solution that isnt tied like some rented mule to a multinational corporations committee based meth-addled future predicting marketing department.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Less about capability, more about lack of standards. IPMI works very well because it was an exceptionally specific standard, that encompassed the requisite functionality without wiggle room.. Just like SNMP mibs developed in the late 90s were nice and specific (and even then, Cisco ignored many of those in favor their proprietary mibs).
In this century, the vendors have taken back control of the newer so-called management 'standards' and make them all terrible. Netconf, CIM, Redfish, all terrible. They all prioritize the ability of the vendors to 'differentiate' to the point of making it useless for developing cross-vendor with a single set of code. So it empowers vendors to convince people they are writing to standards when in fact they are writing locked-in automation, Note that all these standards are comprised *entriely* of vendors, with no customer represenation.
On the flipside, OpenCompute *could* have been something to keep vendors in check. However, in practice only the extremely big companies get their way in designs that don't help the larger industry, and no two customers use the same standards limiting the upside for vendors to comply even if the designs were good.
This would be fine except for the fact that there is pressure to torpedo working standards like IPMI, because 'progress'.