10 ms·

Infrastructure Software is Dead

228 points by ctdean 10y ago

ams6110 10y ago
Everybody’s OpenStack software is equally bad. It’s also as bad as all the other infrastructure software out there – software-defined networking, software-defined storage, cloud management platforms, platforms-as-service, container orchestrators, you name it. It’s all full of bugs, hard to upgrade and a nightmare to operate. It’s all bad. 100% my experience with OpenStack. And the breaking releases every 6 months only add insult to injury.
- luma 10y ago
  There are commercial offerings that provide a much more stable and actually-working solution for these problems. vSphere 6 has had some growing pains and MS still has a way to go to get SCVMM up to scratch but the underlying hypervisors and network/storage stacks work as expected and can do so at scale... if you can afford it.
  - ewams 10y ago
    Talking technology, VMware NSX is the best SDN out there. You can do all the things the competition does but with zero programing.
    - bluejekyll 10y ago
      SDN's are an artifact of classic networking mindsets. There is no air gap, pretending one exists by creating a virtual one is just being blind to the realities of network gear. We need to move beyond SDN and embrace a point-to-point world where trust is established through pki or similar means. SDNs give a false sense of security, add a ridiculous amount of complexity to routing, and create confusion when it's unclear if there is a hardware problem or a software problem. SDNs are only there because people aren't innovating enough in other layers.
      - hueving 10y ago
        Your comment makes no sense. SDN just provides the same barriers as regular network hardware in an automated and more flexible nature. It has nothing to do with data plane confidentiality.
        vog 10y ago
        > SDN just provides the same barriers as regular network hardware in an automated and more flexible nature Unless the implementation has bugs. Then, the sensitive area is just a single zeroday away. Airgaps don't have that attack surface.
        vidarh 10y ago
        But it's not a replacement for air gaps. It's a replacement for things like logging into your switch to manually set up vlans. I agree with your previous point that we should encrypt point to point, but that's one layer up from the problems SDN is solving.
        vog 10y ago
        > I agree with your previous point that we should encrypt point to point ... Just for clarification: That was written by bluejekyll, not by me.
        bluejekyll 10y ago
        SDNs add complexity, and are only necessary because of limitations in the networking protocols. They add extra failure modes and reduce throughput by decreasing MTU. This is almost all because people want virtual networks with their VMs, rather than just embracing IPv6.
      - gsmethells 10y ago
        Yep. This the classic end-to-end argument, a white paper all CS grads must read https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_principle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_principle
- api 10y ago
  Bad infrastructure software with hideous UX is dead.
- bloaf 10y ago
  I may be fundamentally misunderstanding what infrastructure software is, but it sounds an awful lot like a bandaid that's only necessary because our operating systems are all designed for the computing problems of 25 years ago.
  - hueving 10y ago
    Infrastructure software helps avoid directly managing hardware. You can change an OS all you want but that won't change the problem of managing physical resources (storage, network, compute).
    - spyrosg 10y ago
      Wasn't that precisely supposed to be the operating system's job? One, virtualising (Processes in Unix are little virtual machines), and two, hardware resources management (file systems, time sharing, ...). Distributed operating systems tried to do that for multiple computers, but instead we get ad-hoc crap on top of single machine OS'es. Progress!
- jclulow 10y ago
  Right. This part of the article was the most aggrevating for me. Perhaps the author could refrain from speaking for everybody! OpenStack may be a ruinous rubbish barge of a platform, but others are working on software that seeks to _reduce_ operational complexity. Software that does not exist merely to propel yet another band of consultants into a defeatist, over-priced nightmare cathedral of apparently irreducible complexity and unmitigated unreliability. Outcomes for customers are extremely important, but it does not follow that software quality is immaterial, or unachievable, or that OpenStack is just as good a choice as anything else -- even if it does come with a consulting racket.
  - tobias3 10y ago
    One could argue that because all the money is made by consulting, managing upgrades etc. the harder it is to setup, operate and to upgrade the better for the players in the OpenStack space. If the underlying incentives don't coincide with good software you get crappy software.
- hueving 10y ago
  >And the breaking releases every 6 months only add insult to injury. The core services are backwards compatible much longer than 6 months from what I've seen. I'm not sure where you got your experience from, but it doesn't sound like Nova, Cinder, Glance, etc.
- Bombthecat 10y ago
  Vmware sucks too. Ever needs to tell a customer that there is no backup because the cm ducked up.
  - atsaloli 10y ago
    What is the "cm", please?
    - Drdrdrq 10y ago
      Probably vm.
      - atsaloli 10y ago
        Thanks!
ewams 10y ago
It is really funny, I agree with this 100% but also think because of the new norm of instant gratification this person is totally wrong. I have customers that all the time state they want to move to an openstack platform but have no programmers or unwilling to hire programmers. So of course we go down that path, look at the capex and opex and their brains explode. Then we look at aws/azure/vCloud and regular internal cloud with its associated costs and they come back from their heart attacks. If you are a services company, he is right, you should be focusing on outcomes. But, if you can't tell me in 2-3 sentences what problem you are solving and how it benefits the customer you are doing it wrong. This is a world of businesses and businesses need to make money, usually. Everyone gets so caught up on the new hot thing or the new "revolution" or what the competition is doing without thinking of what problem they are trying to solve or what actual value they are providing. This article says they provide outcomes, sure I can provide outcomes by moving you to SAP, or VDI, or hyperconverged, but what problem is this solving? Don't tell me it "cut costs", it rarely does and lots of people smarter than me have shown that cutting costs are not the top priority of most leadership. Back to the point of the article. I have made a lot of money in consulting. I now sell consulting services. You know how I do it? "Yes Mr customer how are you? Cool great, I am fine thanks. So what problems does your organization have, what are your goals, and how can I help you?" Boom. You are all welcome. Don't talk about product or you will lose to me or someone better. Don't talk money or you lose. Don't talk fads or you lose. Talk about the business and how you will help it reach its goals, overcomes it's problems, and grow!
- StillBored 10y ago
  This! I previously worked for a small software company that frequently got itself lost in the upgrade treadmill (its going to take N man months to upgrade underlying technology X/Y/Z to the latest versions). Yet in the end, I kept asking, what does technology X/Y/Z provide to the product that benefits the customer. Those questions frequently didn't have satisfying answers. So, your not the cool, forward looking engineer when you favor using a 5 year old toolchain to build your product. OTOH, your also the engineer that doesn't have to come in on weekends to debug the death march bug that ends up being a result of doing the upgrade.
simbalion 10y ago
Maybe commercial software is dead. We all want it, except for some youngins.. how long can the corporate marketplace defy the will of the people who fuel the market? Free software is the future. The benefits to mankind are too great.
- ryanackley 10y ago
  Reality check: commercial software is bigger than ever. It's also not a dichotomy. Most commercial software relies on open source for various components.
- kordless 10y ago
  We need a business model that makes sense for Open Source developers. Likely pinned to a blockchain for deployments, service updates, support, etc.
  - jclulow 10y ago
    We need to stop trying to jam block chains into everything.
    - jacquesm 10y ago
      Especially when it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
- flyinglizard 10y ago
  This is exactly the point of the article: software becomes commoditized, what matters is the customer outcome.
- morgante 10y ago
  > how long can the corporate marketplace defy the will of the people who fuel the market? How can you claim that it's the will of all developers to be unemployed?
  - 10y ago
cannonball 10y ago
This is so poorly written.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
mmaunder 10y ago
"Who's with me?" ~Jerry Maguire.
dkarapetyan 10y ago
Well everyone is making money except docker. Drives the point home I think. Docker's business is docker and you can't really make money with it whereas everyone else is building a business on top of docker to deliver outcomes to customers.
jpgvm 10y ago
More provocative over insightful. Infrastructure software isn't dead - but Openstack is. It may still be used, and may continue to see a bit of media now and then but really it's gone the way of Puppet/Cfengine/<many proprietry infra software here>. It missed it's chance to be good by allowing itself to be corrupted a massive design by committee disaster. Openstack needed a cohesive vision if it was to stand a chance against the integrated enterprise stacks or the custom in-house ones it sought to supplant. It never had it and at this point it never will. I don't mean any ill-will to any of the Mirantis boys or the other countless hackers that worked on Openstack circa Cinder/Neutron introduction. I was there too, we tried to right the ship before it got too far off-course and we failed. Many smart people tried to make Openstack good but it was out of the hands of the hackers.
- AndyNemmity 10y ago
  and I have the complete opposite view. Openstack is killing it even though it's as crappy as everything else in many ways. It's without cost, it's automatable, you don't build inhouse software to handle it, and you build applications that can withstand software and hardware failures. Openstack isn't a replacement for configuration management. The massive design by committee is fantastic, because you can help change and adapt where openstack goes. You don't have that option with insert vendor. We just disagree completely
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    > It's without cost The hell it is. Of course it has a cost. Cost of a product is more than what you pay for the license.
  - djsumdog 10y ago
    I've worked for two companies that hemorrhaged money trying to set up functional open stack environments. I was on an openstack security team for one company. Omg...yea I'm not going three. I don't feel like raging before bed.
    - AndyNemmity 10y ago
jondubois 10y ago
Distributed orchestration software is only just starting to become usable. See http://rancher.com/.. http://rancher.com/... I wouldn't call infrastructure software dead. It's the beginning. I think the problem is that most existing tools/engines/components which make up software systems (e.g. databases, memory stores, frameworks, etc...) were designed to run on a single machine and so far, it's been the DevOps' responsibility to scale them manually. Even for those components which DO support clustering; their approach is often not compatible with most orchestration systems (they tend to micromanage the cluster - Instead of micromanaging the cluster and thereby fighting the orchestrator, the focus should be on writing simple hooks for the orchestrator to invoke). Developers of tools/engines/components need to change their mindset and start building engines from the ground up to run on distributed orchestration software like Kubernetes, Swarm or Mesos and automatic scalability has to be BUILT INTO every component/service. A major problem is that there seems to be a massive skill divide between DevOps/SysAdmins and Software Developers - Software devs think of systems like Kubernetes and Swarm as being the responsibility of DevOps people and don't spend enough time thinking about how it impacts them. This is the wrong attitude - The two skillsets need to converge in order to build effective solutions. Orchestration management tools are the new operating systems - In the same way that one can build apps/systems which are compatible with Linux, Windows or OSX, we should build apps/systems which are compatible with Kubernetes, Swarm or Mesos. There is more to these orchestration tools than just writing up config files - The code within the components themselves have to be designed to play nice with the automatic scheduling/orchestration requirements.
- danielbln 10y ago
  Agreed on all points. Rancher looks quite good and I'm looking forward to something that will soothe the pain in my ass that is the micromanagement of postgres clusters.
greenspot 10y ago
'Infrastructure software' is a too general simplication. If you break down infrastructure software the OP would find many types of software in this field which aren't dead.
- int0x80 10y ago
  This. First of all, he should define what "infrastructure software" he is refering to. He mostly talks about OpenStack, AWS ... "services". But it is obviously not only that. It is low level libraries (C lib), compilers, interpreters, operating systems, graphic engines, virtualization software, etc. This kind of software runs on allmost all deployments out there. It is far from dead.
- AndrewKemendo 10y ago
  Especially in light of the recent Twilio news - I'd say infrastructure is far from dead.
dunkelheit 10y ago
He is basically saying "don't ever count on openstack becoming non-crappy, we have a vested interest in keeping it crappy so that to get anything done you will still need to pay mirantis to deploy 'hordes of talented infrastructure hackers". Well, thanks for honesty.
vog 10y ago
> But none of this matters, because today customers don’t care about software. Customers care about outcomes. Why "today"? Hasn't this always been the case? It sounds essentially like a rephrasing of Paul Graham's advice: "Make something people want."
yyyuuu 10y ago
Forgive my ignorance but what exactly is infrastructure software?
Ericson2314 10y ago
Heh, it's like http://dtrace.org/blogs/wesolows/2014/12/29/fin/ http://dtrace.org/blogs/wesolows/2014/12/29/fin/ but from a different angle. I personal, naive as it sounds, beleive nix* (as in e.g. NixOS) could be a silver bullet here, but the market is so used to IT being inherently shitty I don't believe it will happen.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  Thanks for the link. I didn't know Cantrill basically imploded. His gripes on Pike's comment and industry mimicked my own. He's way overstating how much people ignore the system level as there's active projects handling it funded by NSF, DARPA, and EU with a practical focus. Most practical being ones with defense contractors (esp Galois) or actual engineers partnered in. Quite a few going from software to firmware to hardware with some to the gates. He could possibly enjoy himself and do some good getting hooked into one of those groups to cover pragmatic, real-world aspects plus spot opportunities as development goes on. "beleive nix* (as in e.g. NixOS) could be a silver bullet here" Come on, now. Try to avoid that trap. You need to look at what the market needs in compatibility/legacy, production worthiness, talent to aid deployment/support, security, and so on. Always consider these plus target markets when evaluating any software platform. NixOS at first glance appears to fall short in quite a few. Now, what I do like about NixOS is its declarative, transaction-oriented packaging. That's great if implemented well given my Linux distro's screw that stuff up to this day when I install an odd package with one incompatibility in it. Irreparably breaks system or appears to. (rolls eyes) Source-based is debatable but allows site-specific optimizations. I'm barely in the debate but lean against systemd, which Cantrill's post mentions incidentally, as it's too complex to be in critical position it inhabits. Critics pointed out a simple thing in its spot plus less privileged services doing management or whatever. Consistent with best practices from high-integrity & high-security engineering going back decades. So, I see it as a weakness albeit a small one in larger picture. So, there's my two cents on that link and claim.
  - 10y ago
mattbee 10y ago
As MD of a medium-sized UK-based cloud server company (Bytemark, cough), I'm so glad to hear someone else saying this. We made the decision in 2010 to design and build our own cloud services stack - from scratch, ultimately including a low-level storage layer. This was just after Openstack was announced, so it felt like a risk not to get on this particular wagon. We opened our service to customers within a year, and fixed what felt like small silly bugs while constantly racing to keep the platform up. Openstack kept getting richer and puffier and more important-sounding. Even though we thought we would eventually "make the switch" I couldn't for the life of me find any success stories, and looking at the software it seemed to have some crucial gaps that we'd need to fill, and a bunch of layers that we didn't need or care about for our simple "cloud servers" offering. We're at the point where mayyyyybe we could think about switching out one or two components, but my gut feeling is that 1) these are quite simple components for us where our maintenance burden is manageable, 2) our model of VMs is slightly different (more permanent) than Openstack's and, of course 3) the integration effort doesn't seem worth it, and the loss of experience compared to our own software seems a huge risk if it puts the stability of our platform at risk. So it still feels like picking a fight with our own stable software for benefit that was way down the line. We're in exactly the same spot at Boris - our customers care about the service, not the software. There is just so much integration with our own hardware, network, data centre & customer services operation that's outside the scope of Openstack that it never quite seemed relevant.
vitoc 10y ago
Well, service, yes. Additionally, freedom from service dependence too.
chris_wot 10y ago
Only slightly facetious, but if they are trying to decouple containers from one another then perhaps they should consider a basic Inversion of Control design principle. Perhaps that's the job of the orchestrator already though.
lifeisstillgood 10y ago
I presume because people still need to run "private cloud" - because of regulation, national borders or not quite trusting AWS with your heart mind and ballsack.
devonkim 10y ago
I've been consulting for public sector and the companies in the Fortune 500 that are behind the software and operations curve from even start-up companies and always will by choice + self-imposed bureaucracy. The problem I've observed consistently across various custom cloud and openstack implementations is that none of the products and technologies that people are developing are able to succeed because everyone assumes that they "solved" basic infrastructure management a decade ago when their operations teams are woefully unskilled, unmotivated, and unable to meet the demands of today's environments. Most organizations do not have monitoring beyond what comes out of the box even for production environments, most places do not have defined SLAs, almost nobody tests backups or their DR runbooks even though they spent $2M+ on a DR implementation. None of this is the fault of the engineers though; their managers wanted silos and people that just go implement their promotion-garnering plans that all go south.
- HannibalLecter 10y ago
  I wish you were wrong. Silos are everywhere -- ugly and unavoidable bottlenecks. Nobody has a plan to fix that culture though because it works only just good enough.
  - devonkim 10y ago
    I personally don't see anything "wrong" with silos - they are the partitions of the distributed systems of human society and are going to emerge anyway partially due to Dunbar's number in a "flat" organization. The issue I see is that managers are unwilling or very slow to understand new lines of division of labor ("What do you mean that sysadmins should also be developers? Why would we want that?" - direct quote from a customer) because it doesn't correspond to what their information systems management textbooks from 2002 told them how IT labor is divided. Then comes issues of training managers and telling people why this re-org is so much better than the last 10. This is why the "devops" movement in enterprise is cheap business consulting labor to me - it results in a re-org in most places, and that's the equivalent of developers showing up at a new shop and suggesting refactors as a newbie. Furthermore, most IT managers have such poor data from the organizations they run that the only things they can track are money spent, not money saved and such. And showing that a CIO doesn't know wtf his company gets you kicked out of meetings permanently in most (typically dysfunctional) organizational cultures.
unethical_ban 10y ago
IaaS vendor says that companies don't want to host their own infrastructure, more at 11. I tried to get a neutral take on this, but it reads far too much like a sales pitch, even for vendor blog levels.
bogomipz 10y ago
"And the reason Mirantis has been successful is because, despite ourselves, outcomes are what we’ve been able to deliver to our customers by complementing crappy OpenStack software with hordes of talented infrastructure hackers that made up for the gaps. This is't really a ringing endorsement of your business is it? It's nice that he acknowledges a talented team but to refer to your core product as "crappy" is more than a little depressing in my opinion.
- praneshp 10y ago
  His product = "crappy openstack" + developers. He is just calling openstack (which is made by the community, not just Mirantis) crappy.
  - bogomipz 10y ago
    Yes thats the point I was making, it's an odd business practice to publicly state that fundamentally your business product is crap.
bogomipz 10y ago
Is infrastructure software dead though, or is just Openstack dead? My perception is Mesos is really impressive and picking up a lot of traction.
digi_owl 10y ago
All this chatter about Openstack and how it fails brings to mind stories of SAP, and the ways it can turn into a money sink.

228 points by ctdean 10y ago

Everybody’s OpenStack software is equally bad. It’s also as bad as all the other infrastructure software out there – software-defined networking, software-defined storage, cloud management platforms, platforms-as-service, container orchestrators, you name it. It’s all full of bugs, hard to upgrade and a nightmare to operate. It’s all bad. 100% my experience with OpenStack. And the breaking releases every 6 months only add insult to injury.

luma 10y ago
There are commercial offerings that provide a much more stable and actually-working solution for these problems. vSphere 6 has had some growing pains and MS still has a way to go to get SCVMM up to scratch but the underlying hypervisors and network/storage stacks work as expected and can do so at scale... if you can afford it.
- ewams 10y ago
  Talking technology, VMware NSX is the best SDN out there. You can do all the things the competition does but with zero programing.
  - bluejekyll 10y ago
    SDN's are an artifact of classic networking mindsets. There is no air gap, pretending one exists by creating a virtual one is just being blind to the realities of network gear. We need to move beyond SDN and embrace a point-to-point world where trust is established through pki or similar means. SDNs give a false sense of security, add a ridiculous amount of complexity to routing, and create confusion when it's unclear if there is a hardware problem or a software problem. SDNs are only there because people aren't innovating enough in other layers.
    - hueving 10y ago
      Your comment makes no sense. SDN just provides the same barriers as regular network hardware in an automated and more flexible nature. It has nothing to do with data plane confidentiality.
      - vog 10y ago
        > SDN just provides the same barriers as regular network hardware in an automated and more flexible nature Unless the implementation has bugs. Then, the sensitive area is just a single zeroday away. Airgaps don't have that attack surface.
        vidarh 10y ago
        But it's not a replacement for air gaps. It's a replacement for things like logging into your switch to manually set up vlans. I agree with your previous point that we should encrypt point to point, but that's one layer up from the problems SDN is solving.
        vog 10y ago
        > I agree with your previous point that we should encrypt point to point ... Just for clarification: That was written by bluejekyll, not by me.
      - bluejekyll 10y ago
        SDNs add complexity, and are only necessary because of limitations in the networking protocols. They add extra failure modes and reduce throughput by decreasing MTU. This is almost all because people want virtual networks with their VMs, rather than just embracing IPv6.
    - gsmethells 10y ago
      Yep. This the classic end-to-end argument, a white paper all CS grads must read https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_principle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_principle
api 10y ago
Bad infrastructure software with hideous UX is dead.
bloaf 10y ago
I may be fundamentally misunderstanding what infrastructure software is, but it sounds an awful lot like a bandaid that's only necessary because our operating systems are all designed for the computing problems of 25 years ago.
- hueving 10y ago
  Infrastructure software helps avoid directly managing hardware. You can change an OS all you want but that won't change the problem of managing physical resources (storage, network, compute).
  - spyrosg 10y ago
    Wasn't that precisely supposed to be the operating system's job? One, virtualising (Processes in Unix are little virtual machines), and two, hardware resources management (file systems, time sharing, ...). Distributed operating systems tried to do that for multiple computers, but instead we get ad-hoc crap on top of single machine OS'es. Progress!
jclulow 10y ago
Right. This part of the article was the most aggrevating for me. Perhaps the author could refrain from speaking for everybody! OpenStack may be a ruinous rubbish barge of a platform, but others are working on software that seeks to _reduce_ operational complexity. Software that does not exist merely to propel yet another band of consultants into a defeatist, over-priced nightmare cathedral of apparently irreducible complexity and unmitigated unreliability. Outcomes for customers are extremely important, but it does not follow that software quality is immaterial, or unachievable, or that OpenStack is just as good a choice as anything else -- even if it does come with a consulting racket.
- tobias3 10y ago
  One could argue that because all the money is made by consulting, managing upgrades etc. the harder it is to setup, operate and to upgrade the better for the players in the OpenStack space. If the underlying incentives don't coincide with good software you get crappy software.
hueving 10y ago
>And the breaking releases every 6 months only add insult to injury. The core services are backwards compatible much longer than 6 months from what I've seen. I'm not sure where you got your experience from, but it doesn't sound like Nova, Cinder, Glance, etc.
Bombthecat 10y ago
Vmware sucks too. Ever needs to tell a customer that there is no backup because the cm ducked up.
- atsaloli 10y ago
  What is the "cm", please?
  - Drdrdrq 10y ago
    Probably vm.
    - atsaloli 10y ago
      Thanks!

ewams 10y ago

It is really funny, I agree with this 100% but also think because of the new norm of instant gratification this person is totally wrong. I have customers that all the time state they want to move to an openstack platform but have no programmers or unwilling to hire programmers. So of course we go down that path, look at the capex and opex and their brains explode. Then we look at aws/azure/vCloud and regular internal cloud with its associated costs and they come back from their heart attacks. If you are a services company, he is right, you should be focusing on outcomes. But, if you can't tell me in 2-3 sentences what problem you are solving and how it benefits the customer you are doing it wrong. This is a world of businesses and businesses need to make money, usually. Everyone gets so caught up on the new hot thing or the new "revolution" or what the competition is doing without thinking of what problem they are trying to solve or what actual value they are providing. This article says they provide outcomes, sure I can provide outcomes by moving you to SAP, or VDI, or hyperconverged, but what problem is this solving? Don't tell me it "cut costs", it rarely does and lots of people smarter than me have shown that cutting costs are not the top priority of most leadership. Back to the point of the article. I have made a lot of money in consulting. I now sell consulting services. You know how I do it? "Yes Mr customer how are you? Cool great, I am fine thanks. So what problems does your organization have, what are your goals, and how can I help you?" Boom. You are all welcome. Don't talk about product or you will lose to me or someone better. Don't talk money or you lose. Don't talk fads or you lose. Talk about the business and how you will help it reach its goals, overcomes it's problems, and grow!

StillBored 10y ago
This! I previously worked for a small software company that frequently got itself lost in the upgrade treadmill (its going to take N man months to upgrade underlying technology X/Y/Z to the latest versions). Yet in the end, I kept asking, what does technology X/Y/Z provide to the product that benefits the customer. Those questions frequently didn't have satisfying answers. So, your not the cool, forward looking engineer when you favor using a 5 year old toolchain to build your product. OTOH, your also the engineer that doesn't have to come in on weekends to debug the death march bug that ends up being a result of doing the upgrade.

simbalion 10y ago

Maybe commercial software is dead. We all want it, except for some youngins.. how long can the corporate marketplace defy the will of the people who fuel the market? Free software is the future. The benefits to mankind are too great.

ryanackley 10y ago
Reality check: commercial software is bigger than ever. It's also not a dichotomy. Most commercial software relies on open source for various components.
kordless 10y ago
We need a business model that makes sense for Open Source developers. Likely pinned to a blockchain for deployments, service updates, support, etc.
- jclulow 10y ago
  We need to stop trying to jam block chains into everything.
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    Especially when it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
flyinglizard 10y ago
This is exactly the point of the article: software becomes commoditized, what matters is the customer outcome.
morgante 10y ago
> how long can the corporate marketplace defy the will of the people who fuel the market? How can you claim that it's the will of all developers to be unemployed?
- 10y ago

cannonball 10y ago

This is so poorly written.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

mmaunder 10y ago

"Who's with me?" ~Jerry Maguire.

dkarapetyan 10y ago

Well everyone is making money except docker. Drives the point home I think. Docker's business is docker and you can't really make money with it whereas everyone else is building a business on top of docker to deliver outcomes to customers.

jpgvm 10y ago

More provocative over insightful. Infrastructure software isn't dead - but Openstack is. It may still be used, and may continue to see a bit of media now and then but really it's gone the way of Puppet/Cfengine/<many proprietry infra software here>. It missed it's chance to be good by allowing itself to be corrupted a massive design by committee disaster. Openstack needed a cohesive vision if it was to stand a chance against the integrated enterprise stacks or the custom in-house ones it sought to supplant. It never had it and at this point it never will. I don't mean any ill-will to any of the Mirantis boys or the other countless hackers that worked on Openstack circa Cinder/Neutron introduction. I was there too, we tried to right the ship before it got too far off-course and we failed. Many smart people tried to make Openstack good but it was out of the hands of the hackers.

AndyNemmity 10y ago
and I have the complete opposite view. Openstack is killing it even though it's as crappy as everything else in many ways. It's without cost, it's automatable, you don't build inhouse software to handle it, and you build applications that can withstand software and hardware failures. Openstack isn't a replacement for configuration management. The massive design by committee is fantastic, because you can help change and adapt where openstack goes. You don't have that option with insert vendor. We just disagree completely
- jacquesm 10y ago
  > It's without cost The hell it is. Of course it has a cost. Cost of a product is more than what you pay for the license.
- djsumdog 10y ago
  I've worked for two companies that hemorrhaged money trying to set up functional open stack environments. I was on an openstack security team for one company. Omg...yea I'm not going three. I don't feel like raging before bed.
  - AndyNemmity 10y ago

jondubois 10y ago

Distributed orchestration software is only just starting to become usable. See http://rancher.com/.. http://rancher.com/... I wouldn't call infrastructure software dead. It's the beginning. I think the problem is that most existing tools/engines/components which make up software systems (e.g. databases, memory stores, frameworks, etc...) were designed to run on a single machine and so far, it's been the DevOps' responsibility to scale them manually. Even for those components which DO support clustering; their approach is often not compatible with most orchestration systems (they tend to micromanage the cluster - Instead of micromanaging the cluster and thereby fighting the orchestrator, the focus should be on writing simple hooks for the orchestrator to invoke). Developers of tools/engines/components need to change their mindset and start building engines from the ground up to run on distributed orchestration software like Kubernetes, Swarm or Mesos and automatic scalability has to be BUILT INTO every component/service. A major problem is that there seems to be a massive skill divide between DevOps/SysAdmins and Software Developers - Software devs think of systems like Kubernetes and Swarm as being the responsibility of DevOps people and don't spend enough time thinking about how it impacts them. This is the wrong attitude - The two skillsets need to converge in order to build effective solutions. Orchestration management tools are the new operating systems - In the same way that one can build apps/systems which are compatible with Linux, Windows or OSX, we should build apps/systems which are compatible with Kubernetes, Swarm or Mesos. There is more to these orchestration tools than just writing up config files - The code within the components themselves have to be designed to play nice with the automatic scheduling/orchestration requirements.

danielbln 10y ago
Agreed on all points. Rancher looks quite good and I'm looking forward to something that will soothe the pain in my ass that is the micromanagement of postgres clusters.

greenspot 10y ago

'Infrastructure software' is a too general simplication. If you break down infrastructure software the OP would find many types of software in this field which aren't dead.

int0x80 10y ago
This. First of all, he should define what "infrastructure software" he is refering to. He mostly talks about OpenStack, AWS ... "services". But it is obviously not only that. It is low level libraries (C lib), compilers, interpreters, operating systems, graphic engines, virtualization software, etc. This kind of software runs on allmost all deployments out there. It is far from dead.
AndrewKemendo 10y ago
Especially in light of the recent Twilio news - I'd say infrastructure is far from dead.

dunkelheit 10y ago

He is basically saying "don't ever count on openstack becoming non-crappy, we have a vested interest in keeping it crappy so that to get anything done you will still need to pay mirantis to deploy 'hordes of talented infrastructure hackers". Well, thanks for honesty.

vog 10y ago

> But none of this matters, because today customers don’t care about software. Customers care about outcomes. Why "today"? Hasn't this always been the case? It sounds essentially like a rephrasing of Paul Graham's advice: "Make something people want."

yyyuuu 10y ago

Forgive my ignorance but what exactly is infrastructure software?

Ericson2314 10y ago

Heh, it's like http://dtrace.org/blogs/wesolows/2014/12/29/fin/ http://dtrace.org/blogs/wesolows/2014/12/29/fin/ but from a different angle. I personal, naive as it sounds, beleive nix* (as in e.g. NixOS) could be a silver bullet here, but the market is so used to IT being inherently shitty I don't believe it will happen.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
nickpsecurity 10y ago
Thanks for the link. I didn't know Cantrill basically imploded. His gripes on Pike's comment and industry mimicked my own. He's way overstating how much people ignore the system level as there's active projects handling it funded by NSF, DARPA, and EU with a practical focus. Most practical being ones with defense contractors (esp Galois) or actual engineers partnered in. Quite a few going from software to firmware to hardware with some to the gates. He could possibly enjoy himself and do some good getting hooked into one of those groups to cover pragmatic, real-world aspects plus spot opportunities as development goes on. "beleive nix* (as in e.g. NixOS) could be a silver bullet here" Come on, now. Try to avoid that trap. You need to look at what the market needs in compatibility/legacy, production worthiness, talent to aid deployment/support, security, and so on. Always consider these plus target markets when evaluating any software platform. NixOS at first glance appears to fall short in quite a few. Now, what I do like about NixOS is its declarative, transaction-oriented packaging. That's great if implemented well given my Linux distro's screw that stuff up to this day when I install an odd package with one incompatibility in it. Irreparably breaks system or appears to. (rolls eyes) Source-based is debatable but allows site-specific optimizations. I'm barely in the debate but lean against systemd, which Cantrill's post mentions incidentally, as it's too complex to be in critical position it inhabits. Critics pointed out a simple thing in its spot plus less privileged services doing management or whatever. Consistent with best practices from high-integrity & high-security engineering going back decades. So, I see it as a weakness albeit a small one in larger picture. So, there's my two cents on that link and claim.
- 10y ago

mattbee 10y ago

As MD of a medium-sized UK-based cloud server company (Bytemark, cough), I'm so glad to hear someone else saying this. We made the decision in 2010 to design and build our own cloud services stack - from scratch, ultimately including a low-level storage layer. This was just after Openstack was announced, so it felt like a risk not to get on this particular wagon. We opened our service to customers within a year, and fixed what felt like small silly bugs while constantly racing to keep the platform up. Openstack kept getting richer and puffier and more important-sounding. Even though we thought we would eventually "make the switch" I couldn't for the life of me find any success stories, and looking at the software it seemed to have some crucial gaps that we'd need to fill, and a bunch of layers that we didn't need or care about for our simple "cloud servers" offering. We're at the point where mayyyyybe we could think about switching out one or two components, but my gut feeling is that 1) these are quite simple components for us where our maintenance burden is manageable, 2) our model of VMs is slightly different (more permanent) than Openstack's and, of course 3) the integration effort doesn't seem worth it, and the loss of experience compared to our own software seems a huge risk if it puts the stability of our platform at risk. So it still feels like picking a fight with our own stable software for benefit that was way down the line. We're in exactly the same spot at Boris - our customers care about the service, not the software. There is just so much integration with our own hardware, network, data centre & customer services operation that's outside the scope of Openstack that it never quite seemed relevant.

vitoc 10y ago

Well, service, yes. Additionally, freedom from service dependence too.

chris_wot 10y ago

Only slightly facetious, but if they are trying to decouple containers from one another then perhaps they should consider a basic Inversion of Control design principle. Perhaps that's the job of the orchestrator already though.

lifeisstillgood 10y ago

I presume because people still need to run "private cloud" - because of regulation, national borders or not quite trusting AWS with your heart mind and ballsack.

devonkim 10y ago

I've been consulting for public sector and the companies in the Fortune 500 that are behind the software and operations curve from even start-up companies and always will by choice + self-imposed bureaucracy. The problem I've observed consistently across various custom cloud and openstack implementations is that none of the products and technologies that people are developing are able to succeed because everyone assumes that they "solved" basic infrastructure management a decade ago when their operations teams are woefully unskilled, unmotivated, and unable to meet the demands of today's environments. Most organizations do not have monitoring beyond what comes out of the box even for production environments, most places do not have defined SLAs, almost nobody tests backups or their DR runbooks even though they spent $2M+ on a DR implementation. None of this is the fault of the engineers though; their managers wanted silos and people that just go implement their promotion-garnering plans that all go south.

HannibalLecter 10y ago
I wish you were wrong. Silos are everywhere -- ugly and unavoidable bottlenecks. Nobody has a plan to fix that culture though because it works only just good enough.
- devonkim 10y ago
  I personally don't see anything "wrong" with silos - they are the partitions of the distributed systems of human society and are going to emerge anyway partially due to Dunbar's number in a "flat" organization. The issue I see is that managers are unwilling or very slow to understand new lines of division of labor ("What do you mean that sysadmins should also be developers? Why would we want that?" - direct quote from a customer) because it doesn't correspond to what their information systems management textbooks from 2002 told them how IT labor is divided. Then comes issues of training managers and telling people why this re-org is so much better than the last 10. This is why the "devops" movement in enterprise is cheap business consulting labor to me - it results in a re-org in most places, and that's the equivalent of developers showing up at a new shop and suggesting refactors as a newbie. Furthermore, most IT managers have such poor data from the organizations they run that the only things they can track are money spent, not money saved and such. And showing that a CIO doesn't know wtf his company gets you kicked out of meetings permanently in most (typically dysfunctional) organizational cultures.

unethical_ban 10y ago

IaaS vendor says that companies don't want to host their own infrastructure, more at 11. I tried to get a neutral take on this, but it reads far too much like a sales pitch, even for vendor blog levels.

bogomipz 10y ago

"And the reason Mirantis has been successful is because, despite ourselves, outcomes are what we’ve been able to deliver to our customers by complementing crappy OpenStack software with hordes of talented infrastructure hackers that made up for the gaps. This is't really a ringing endorsement of your business is it? It's nice that he acknowledges a talented team but to refer to your core product as "crappy" is more than a little depressing in my opinion.

praneshp 10y ago
His product = "crappy openstack" + developers. He is just calling openstack (which is made by the community, not just Mirantis) crappy.
- bogomipz 10y ago
  Yes thats the point I was making, it's an odd business practice to publicly state that fundamentally your business product is crap.

bogomipz 10y ago

Is infrastructure software dead though, or is just Openstack dead? My perception is Mesos is really impressive and picking up a lot of traction.

digi_owl 10y ago

All this chatter about Openstack and how it fails brings to mind stories of SAP, and the ways it can turn into a money sink.