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 a

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.