21 ms·

Intel Pulls Out of OpenStack Effort It Founded with Rackspace

201 points by kefka 9y ago

holydude 9y ago
I never saw a compan benefitting from openstack.
- karlkatzke 9y ago
  I'm at one of the only companies I know of outside Rackspace that's running it in production. We're doing a very poor job of it; we never hit production with any effort to upgrade the cluster in the past three years, so we're still running Havana with Nova Network. The most likely upgrade path for us right now is VMWare 6.5.
  - kefka 9y ago
    So are we. And so is another department in our org. Frankly, we're doing a piss poor job of it. Migrations don't happen even if manually ran, the compute nodes are already at capacity, even with the meagre VMs we use. I have kept pushing for Mesos myself. I see it as a good way forward. Openstack may be a technical good body of code... But in the end its too convoluted codebase and many moving parts to be effective in most deployments.
    - benley 9y ago
      Mesos isn't really a direct replacement for Openstack, but you're probably still right to be pushing for it. If you roll with Mesos you will still need to solve a bunch of lower-level infrastructure challenges: machine provisioning, basic system config management, storage management (if you want persistent volumes), fancy networking (if you want ip-per-container or any sort of network isolation), and so on. Like Openstack, Mesos brings its own set of new complications. Unlike Openstack, Mesos almost always increases efficiency of operations once it's in use. Openstack always seems to result in more and more effort spent on just operating Openstack...
      - kefka 9y ago
        Too true that Mesos isn't a drop-in replacement. Far from it. There is quite a lot of complexity as well in Mesos.. But looking at it, there are also less moving parts with Mesos compared to OpenStack. As a test, I set up a Mesos Cluster in 3 VM's. It wasn't terribly hard at all. But at work, we had an alarm thrown in nagios about critical ram consumption on a node. So I go and do the migrate. It works.... And it doesn't. It migrated the VM to the same node. I had to do 2 extra flags to tell OpenStack to migrate the node properly. That's just ridiculous, and dumb. And not to mention, but Mesos supports proper handling of VMs and migration. It frustrates me to no end the amount of hand-holding I have to do with anything OpenStack based. Whereas Mesos was "Install, configure, run".. With a large amount of work on Configure.
  - SEJeff 9y ago
    Do you work at eBay, because they run kubernetes ontop of openstack, which sounds a bit awful if you really think about it all.
    - kefka 9y ago
      Not really. Kubernetes is stupidly unstable. When I was testing it a while back, the master processes kept dying for no good reason and leaving half-on processes with no networking. And then you get to restart everything. Yay. Whereas if Kubernetes is on something else (OpenStack/Mesos) you at least have control to restart Kubernetes when it shits its brick.
      - specialp 9y ago
        The "a while back" qualifier here is important. Both Mesos and Kubernetes are relatively new projects in a rapidly moving space. FWIW we are running Kubernetes 1.4x with multiple redundant masters in production with no problems. We are also running Mesos/Marathon internally. These projects did have major issues early on but now they are becoming much more robust. For control we are using CoreOS with kube-aws. It actually works quite nicely as we can scale and upgrade running clusters. The only issue with it right now is upgrading and managing etcd. I think the whole issue with OpenStack is the overambitious goal to be a one stop from bare metal servers and switches to applications. Kubernetes with Flannel or Calico can take care of the software level networking and provisioning, while there are a lot of other ways to provision VMs for running Mesos or Kubernetes depending on where you are deploying.
        traf68 9y ago
        Kubernetes and the push for it is religious. Get out of here with that. Not all of us have been industry < 10 years
        SEJeff 9y ago
        I've been in "the industry" professionally since ~2005, and with Linux since 1998 or so. I have a business need for kubernetes and there is nothing at all religious about it. It is simply that we have lots of new applications that need to be spun up and deployed. They might need to scale up or scale down, and we have gobs and gobs of on-premise (read 0 cloud) new hardware. "API Driven" infrastructure is the best way to achieve a better story for the various ops teams, and so we're building out some kubernetes clusters globally for them. In other news: http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/facebook/001/044/247/297.png http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/facebook/001/044/247/297...
  - praneshp 9y ago
    Huh, it's that bad for you? I used to work in the Openstack team at Yahoo, and thanks to the efforts of my colleagues, the first thing we got out of the way was upgrades. One of my friends made Anvil[0] We stayed with the community till the SVP decided it was time to move all of Yahoo to AWS. I always wonder if one of Openstack's weaknesses was also the same thing that was it's strength, it's openness and need to support everything, as well as remaining agnostic to users. Nearly every company I know needs to register VMs on a local DB of some sort, and has patches on Openstack to do that. But every time I went on IRC and asked if we should think about a nicer way of providing this hook, I'd either be redirected to a different project, or get some rude replies. I also wish there were some more modern companies behind the project; a lot of the developers were probably under pressure from penny pinchers in the management. That said, it was a terrific project to start my career on. [0]: https://github.com/openstack/anvil https://github.com/openstack/anvil
  - justinhensley 9y ago
    Are you using TripleO/Red Hat Platform Director? Can you share the size of your OpenStack environment? When you say VMware 6.5, are you referring to ESXi aka vSphere Hypervisor? That is not a 1 for 1 replacement of OpenStack.
    - karlkatzke 9y ago
      No, we're not. Our environment is small; only about 100 VMs. We're a Debian shop, so no redhat. No, it's not a 1:1 replacement. It's a migration. It would also be a migration if we decided to upgrade OpenStack, because we'd be going Havana -> Ocata. However, there are defined upgrade paths for ESX, we already have ESXi/vSphere in our environment, and we can hire someone relatively inexpensively to help us with vSphere if we need to augment our staff. Folks who understand Openstack are not anywhere near as easy to find and pay.
  - cr0sh 9y ago
    I worked for a company (Nobis Technology Group) that was acquired by LeaseWeb USA; I was a part of the "server automation" team and was somewhat reluctantly "forced out" of the team after the transition (they basically offered to pay me a smaller salary to work for them - do I look stupid?). The team was essentially dissolved several months later, as I knew it would be. But for the short period I was there (about 2 years), it was a great place to work, and a high point in my total career. Prior to that position, I had been doing web development in PHP pretty much exclusively. Doing server automation was a completely new space to me. Soon after starting, our team was tasked with a migration to OpenStack. Since our current infrastructure front-end was already based on PHP, I got tasked with looking into how or if we could use PHP OpenCloud to work with OpenStack. It seemed workable to me; I was able to extend the classes in such a way using namespaces and other techniques so that we could add additional capabilities to the interface that weren't already supported (and there were a lot of holes to fill!), but wouldn't break things if/when we had to upgrade OpenCloud (this was ultimately tested a couple times I was there, and the changes proved flawless - at least on the PHP side). Ultimately, we had a nice stable front-end that worked well with both our original system (some VM architecture that I forget) and the new "cloud" infrastructure based around OpenStack. In effect, a user could deploy either an actual server (if available), provision a VM (if a server was available), or build a cloud server "system" from a myriad of parts (we tried to support and provide as much access to the OpenStack stuff as we could). We also had a RESTful API for clients to also used (some of our clients resold our services under their own names). Some of the backend stuff was a bit "messy" in how it worked (I won't go into details, but I "authored" a fake "O'Reilly" "book" (really just a front "cover" mainly) whose mascot was dickbutt) - but despite the mess, overall it worked well, considering all the moving parts (where it would tend to fall down - not always, but enough - was when an upgrade to OpenStack was performed). In short - we were also one of the few companies running OpenStack in production. Our owners ended up selling to LeaseWeb, I left - but the idea was that LeaseWeb wanted to transition things to their API and system, and I honestly don't know what happened with all the work and such I was involved in on the PHP side of things (there was also a point where me and a coworker had to quickly ramp up and learn GoLang to make an interface from Rancher/Docker over to the Nobis API - that was a fun and interesting experience). I imagine that some portion is still running, but who knows. I personally think that in the right hands and with the right infrastructure OpenStack can be a very workable and working technology. It seemed to work well for the systems we used while I was at Nobis. I don't know honestly whether you could use it to scale up to anything like AWS or Google's offerings, but I think for medium-sized stuff like we were doing (or like Digital Ocean does - who at the time was our direct competition), it can work well - at least as I experienced things.
- SSLy 9y ago
  att runs it in-house and they seem to like it.
  - praneshp 9y ago
    I was at their keynote in one of the Openstack summit. I can guarantee that at least the VP that spoke about it knows nothing about openstack, and were just using Mirantis to deploy. They just threw Buzzwords around, one of which was Fuel[0] [0]: https://www.mirantis.com/software/openstack/fuel/ https://www.mirantis.com/software/openstack/fuel/
    - AndyNemmity 9y ago
      That's VPs for you, I wouldn't want our understanding of openstack to be judged by VPs either...
      - praneshp 9y ago
        Oh, to be clear, his knowledge of Openstack was thin, even for a vp
- p932 9y ago
  Apparently RedHat does: http://www.serverwatch.com/server-news/red-hat-growing-million-dollar-openstack-deals.html http://www.serverwatch.com/server-news/red-hat-growing-milli... https://investors.redhat.com/~/media/Files/R/Red-Hat-IR/documents/events/q4-2016-earnings-call-prep-remarks.pdf https://investors.redhat.com/~/media/Files/R/Red-Hat-IR/docu...
- AndyNemmity 9y ago
  We're running Openstack with Kubernetes and it's working quite well. Lots of challenges though, and we're just exiting a preview phase into production.
  - kiranmova 9y ago
    How are you deploying? Are you using Tectonic? https://coreos.com/openstack/ https://coreos.com/openstack/
- justinhensley 9y ago
  I have seen several successful implementations in the 18 months I've been working with OpenStack. There are definitely gotchas and low level (driver, hardware)issues you have to deal with. I never thought I would be so familiar with IPMI. That said, OpenStack is an ambitious product. It essentially seeks to give you a lot of the functionality of AWS, except with on-premise infrastructure. That is a tall order. AWS is a multi-billion dollar effort that I assume has has far more engineers than the OpenStack project. OpenStack is a complex solution to a very complex problem. Having worked with other commercial IaaS solutions, I will say I hands down prefer OpenStack to the others I've worked with. If there is a private cloud solution that delivers the same/similar functionality of OpenStack with less admin overhead and more simplicity, then I want to hear about it.
iamthepieman 9y ago
the article mentions other big players pulling out or cutting jobs/funding related to OpenStack in recent months in addition to this latest move by Intel. Is this related to some endemic problem with the technology, big egos within the project, dominance by another outside player or what? Cursory searching doesn't reveal any "big thing". Maybe it's just dying a death by a thousand cuts.
- api 9y ago
  I don't know about today, but a few years ago I tried to set it up and found it to be an uninstallable massive ball of twine and chewing gum. It was shockingly clunky. I can't imagine running something like that in production. I suppose it'd be good job security for a lot of sysadmins.
  - throwasehasdwi 9y ago
    I saw the same. It had great promise but was cobbled together poorly enough that nobody wants their name on it anymore :(
  - eropple 9y ago
    It hasn't improved much, at least not of three months ago. Automating the rollout of any particularly is a Herculean task and even doing it by hand is onerous. Devstack works. Sort of. Poorly. Everything else is pay-a-consultant territory.
  - AndyNemmity 9y ago
    I just moved into an openstack development job, and I'm struggling. So many technologies and complexities you have to keep in mind, even within a single project. I'm hoping it comes together soon. I have not provided a ton of value yet just sitting here learning, and breaking so many things.
    - justinhensley 9y ago
      It is a lot to ingest. Can you elaborate on the OpenStack development you are doing? OpenStack refers to a number of different projects (Nova, Neutron, Horizon, etc). I would advise getting a high level understanding of how Nova, Neutron, and Cinder/Swift interoperate. Then drill in to Neutron. As with every other cloud platform I've worked with, most of the IaaS complexity lies in Networking, in my opinion. Neutron, and SDN in general, is a fairly complex topic depending on your experience with network architecture and administration.
micah_chatt 9y ago
Is there any chance that vendors (like Intel) will care less about the API for accessing their products, as there seems to be more consolidation around API's for running applications like Kubernetes. Intel is a member of the CNCF [1] and seems to be putting money behind it. Am I reading too much into that and is Intel just a big company that puts money in lots of places? [1]: https://www.cncf.io/about/members/ https://www.cncf.io/about/members/
- throwasehasdwi 9y ago
  Intel's new bread and butter is the server space. They are doing everything possible to make sure they stay on the forefront. With the slowdown of single threaded scaling Intel knows that performance improvements for consumers in the near future will be increasingly anemic. Servers and ML are two spaces where increasing core counts still makes sense.
- detaro 9y ago
  They have an interest in a large server ecosystem in general, with options for running your own infrastructure, because it's a lot more profitable for them to sell server CPUs to many companies that don't have as much options to pressure them on price as e.g. Amazon can, and to get their special features integrated so they can use them as arguments against other CPU vendors. They don't care as much which option wins, so it makes sense to be involved with anything that seems important.
- benballjr 9y ago
  It's probably a little of everything. Intel does put a lot of resources into projects like Kubernetes and other communities adjacent to Linux Foundation / CNCF, but I think they put a lot of money anywhere they see a future for utilizing their products... and I think that gets little abstract, sorta. Or rather, they invest in some things that seem like they're partially related to a lot of their core interests.
twelvenmonkeys 9y ago
Is there an alternative out there for OpenStack? Perhaps a minimalist version?
- jmedefind 9y ago
  We're using Joyent's Triton platform and like it a lot. It's been super stable and great for us. Plus #smartos has been incredibly responsive and helpful with any problems we run into. There is also Proxmox and Cloudstack.
  - unethical_ban 9y ago
    Is Joyent's documentation less than three years old yet? I wanted to dive into Joyent but their wiki was skeletal. To make my comment more useful: I'm hearing good things about Proxmox and will likely lab it up soon. r/homelab has some feedback on it as well.
    - jmedefind 9y ago
      Their docs site has always been decent enough for us. https://docs.joyent.com/private-cloud https://docs.joyent.com/private-cloud Anything missing or questionable could usually be resolved by looking in the docs folder of the corresponding service's github repo.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
- Nux 9y ago
  Cloudstack, OpenNebula - though they are not minimalist.
- X86BSD 9y ago
  So depending on your use case, some of you might be very interested in CloudABI. See: https://nuxi.nl https://nuxi.nl to solve some of your issues. Ed is a FreeBSD committer and has been working on solving some of the harder problems relating to security and god I hate to use this word but "containers" or "containerization" of applications. If you write your app to the CloudABI spec it will run on any of the supported platforms. The video of his presentation at the 32C3 conference does a much better job explaining it. It's certainly worth your time to watch.
rectang 9y ago
Consortiums are inherently unstable. Marketing interests drive wild swings in participation and funding. Open governance by individuals is much more stable. That stability benefits both individuals (whose stake is not vaporized when they change employers) and businesses (who are more insulated from impulsive moves by big players).
driverdan 9y ago
Sites with autoplay videos should be banned.
- benley 9y ago
  I very much agree. Clicked link, read five words, site started screaming some garbage advertising at me, closed tab immediately. It's not even the video that bothers me so much - it's the autoplay audio that causes me to immediately close the tab and never return to a site. Ugh.
  - kefka 9y ago
    Yeah, I looked for another link that didn't have such obnoxious refuse... Id' be game if you can find a less spammy site. But when I submitted this an hour ago, there wasn't any.
    - benley 9y ago
      For what it's worth, it's fortune.com that annoyed me, not your link to it. Thanks for looking for alternatives at least :-)
- RubenSandwich 9y ago
  I've recently started using this Chrome Plugin to disable autoplay: https://github.com/Eloston/disable-html5-autoplay https://github.com/Eloston/disable-html5-autoplay. So far works about 95% of the time, but it recently became unmaintained. It also does not distinguish between when you click on a video and the next link plays it, e.g. Following a link to a YouTube Video or Netflix show.
  - Profragile 9y ago
    I just use Scriptsafe to block everything.
xemdetia 9y ago
From someone not very invested in the OpenStack process it feels like all the momentum of the recent push of the project just withered away all at once. I am not sure if the container crowd ate it's lunch, where containerized appliances just solve the problem of openstack better.
- kashyapc 9y ago
  [Disclosure: I spend a (not too large) _portion_ of my time on the OpenStack Compute project, so adjust my comments for bias.] Please. You seem to be making the same mistake, that many make on blogs and news websites, of exclaiming "containers are the future!" while both VMs and containers have their place and use-cases. I'd rather suggest you read the below. (Since I'm linking to a blog, quick background about the author: Rich is one of the long-time contributors of KVM-based Virtualization stack and the lead author / maintainer of libguestfs.org) https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2013/06/19/the-boring-truth-full-virtualization-and-containerization-both-have-their-place/ https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2013/06/19/the-boring-truth-full-...
  - foobiekr 9y ago
    VMs have their place, but a lot of what kind of built the OpenStack hype engine - dynamic workload deployment and multitenant-style management - also is what driving the (also partly aspirational) deployment of containers. The thing is, though, they are at odds. Enterprises don't have nearly the dynamic workload set that people thought but where they legitimately have some is in devops style development. And if you have container management, which you do, then highly dynamic VM management is much less valuable.
  - xemdetia 9y ago
    I am not really claiming containers are the future, but from someone who is actively working on a network appliance I have people asking me at least twice a month about containers to put my product in (from people who are already managing 10k+ systems and wanting to simplify deployment). I have heard zero buzz about OpenStack except during a SVP drive by about a year ago. Most of the customer sites I interact with on the high end just end up baking their own system images tied to a SSO solution and just manage it with VMWare/Ansible/something homegrown. On the low end people just don't deal with OpenStack at all and just do it the hard way with a VMWare or KVM style solution. For either side of that equation containerization is a faster value-add. From the other side what people ask me about cloud integration is more feature-driven of particular clouds than anything else. I'm just not seeing the momentum in the field.
atarian 9y ago
The article just mentions that Intel is no longer funding OSIC, which from what I read is essentially a data center for contributors to use (for free?). I could totally see why Intel would have second thoughts about footing a server bill; I don't think it means they're officially out of OpenStack.
- ajdlinux 9y ago
  My understanding is that the OSIC program also included funding for Rackspace + Intel OpenStack developers, some proportion of whom will probably be losing their jobs out of this I imagine.
foobiekr 9y ago
OpenStack really has a bunch of problems. The big one is that OpenStack is about building and operating your own Rackspace; this is not something IT organizations can even hire for let alone carry off. The idea that they could/would/should was purely aspirational. The others are that it's basically a mess - no two OS deployments will look the same - and that it has neither an operational advantage nor too much of a pricing advantage (50% for RHAT) over VMware - which is better integrated and much, much better from a admin experience and debuggability standpoint. I looked hard at leveraging OpenStack for the service we were building but the underlying code was often cringetastic and somewhat naive. At some level if you run software as a service you can work around poor code quality - something friends from AWS have emphasized - but you can't throw it over the wall and have other people without large engineering staffs there to help run it - which doesn't work in the small. VMware is the opposite approach - the entire model and practices evolved out of arm's reach software sales and support. So naturally it works better.
- mattbee 9y ago
  As a small competitor to Racksapce in 2010, designing a replacement for our (then) 8-year old VM structure, Bytemark bet against Openstack from the 1st announcement and spent years building something the-same-but-different. It wasn't _just_ that Openstack was unreleased and talking about foundations and making grand promises without any production-grade code. It was just that we could never work out which version Rackspace was actually running for their actual customers, and the details of how to actually _deploy_ it and make it work seemed enormously fiddly compared to VMWare, which was where they were taking aim. I expected them to say "now running on Openstack, 100%!" Also the design seemed to mirror AWS, as if the only answer to their dominance was to ... copy every facility they were producing exactly? We had a more definite vision of where VMs should go, and thought it was a bad plan to aim at "Amazon, but smaller!". In particular we really really wanted live migrations to be a part of our platform - where we really really cared about uptime of individual VMs, and wanted people to be able to upgrade them on the fly. Plus, y'know, for a hosting company, being in control of, and having opinions of our hosting platform was what people paid us for! So we designed our in-house platform BigV instead (now Bytemark Cloud Servers) -> https://blog.bytemark.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/DesignAndImplementationOfBigV.pdf https://blog.bytemark.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Desig... [pdf] And even though we (re)invented an NBD server to make all the live migration stuff work https://github.com/BytemarkHosting/flexnbd-c https://github.com/BytemarkHosting/flexnbd-c I believe we've ended up with something that does a small number of things far better. I see people asking whether Openstack is actually running anywhere very public, and have read some pained war stories. So it still feels like the right decision, even before this announcement. Plus it seems like live migration in Openstack is still an exotic and difficult option, whereas that's been our standard practice for years. There are plenty of problems running your own hosting stack, but I like that we can solve our own problems on our own terms, and tie software decisions to hardware or data centre decisions that we make at the same time. I eye up Kubernetes & Ganeti every few months, but they keep reminding me that if you've got the expertise, and a specific purpose in mind, you can usually build something that fits your purpose more closely. (though the second half of that sentence will probably be written on my self-carved tombstone)
turnip1979 9y ago
I am sad to see these negative events as someone who was in the openstack community. But I think a lot of folks knew such stuff was going to happen. I think the mistakes made were: 1) the so-called big tent approach 2) too much complexity 3) core projects not listening to end-users, and focusing too much on the plug-in model It is a shame because there were so many smart and hard working folks involved. It really felt like a community experience.
kordless 9y ago
I ran an OpenStack cluster in my house for a few years. The deployment was managed by a bunch of scripts which I wrote and published to help others learn the basics in deploying an OpenStack cluster, sans most of the more complicated networking stuff. Last count, about 25K unique IPs downloaded the images used in those scripts to launch test instances. At one time I held the top 3rd or 4th link on Google for "openstack install". A few years ago, I leveraged a bunch of methods in OpenStack to build a thing which would launch instances based on Bitcoin payments to certain preloaded addresses. These addresses allowed "templates" to be associated with cluster capabilities and code to be deployed. Payments to that address in Bitcoin would immediately net you an instance, of a certain type, on someone's infrastructure. The general idea behind this creation was a way to abstract hardware components into a system by which applications could launch themselves and utilize the resources provided in a fair, secure and trustworthy way. It is my belief this model was WAY ahead of it's time, a precursor to the hybrid models we see emerging today, and lead directly to my personal realization that federation of all systems will be a basic requirement for implementing trusted computing in the future. We're going to need it with AI. Not sure how I know that, but there it is, irrationality and all. Unfortunately, standardizing deployment methodologies doesn't net you federation. Standardization itself doesn't net you trust, unless everyone can agree on the standard, which is out of necessity done in an non-trustworthy way. Votes of a board, for example, aren't represented with fair consensus, unless there's an algorithm behind the votes. Otherwise, votes end up being slightly irrational, because people behind the votes are slightly irrational. Or very irrational, depending on the company they work for. And yes, federation can be implemented in a trustworthy way by a corporation, such as Google or Amazon, but that requires all people in that federation (a discrete group) agree they will use this thing to implement trust, even though the thing may not actually have trust implemented in a rational way (i.e. by algorithm). At the end of the day, OpenStack was doomed not because of container tech, or the structure of the board, or who ran the biggest cluster, or because it was overly complicated for simple use cases. It failed because it did not implement the basic requirement of delivering trusted infrastructure in a scalable and trustworthy way across a broad range of infrastructure, in a wide range of locations, and do so in a way that separates the use of the infras from the irrationality of humans running the infra. Until something does that, and does it well, we're stuck with Google, Amazon and other provider's solutions. This is also a good rationalization for the continued increase of cloud services by companies and the continued emergence of hybrid models in the future.
timeu 9y ago
We (scientific research institute) are currently operating a relatively small commercially supported Openstack (Liberty release) installation next to our HPC infrastructure and so far it works quite well. Of course, because we are using Openstack from a commercial vendor, the installation/provisioning is quite straightforward (although there is quite a bit of complexity, if you want to do a lot of adjustments). So far we didn't have any big troubles during operations and our users (researchers) have started to use it (creating VMs for specific applications). We will hopefully upgrade soon to the Newton release which will enable us to provide SaaS (Murano) and CaaS (Magnum) to the users. We will probably also evaluate Openshift on top of Openstack. The biggest pain points is the integration with our existing HPC infrastructure (specifically the parallel filesystem/storage). We haven't really looked much at the code except of debugging some authentication issues, when we tried to integrate keystone with our core IT's AD, so we can't comment on that. Additionally, the official openstack documentation (the commercially supported one is quite superficial) is often very confusing and it's very hard to find proper CHANGELOGS for each of the openstack components. Also we really don't like (or rather despise) openstack's issue tracker (Launchpad). It is very hard to find any existing issues, when we encounter some problems.
spotinsun 9y ago
At our facility, we have an OpenStack-based private cloud that we worked with Sardina Systems to put in place. It is production and we have not had any problems with it. We have also undergone upgrade from Mitaka to Newton with zero-downtime and completed within a day (I understand that zero-downtime upgrade is a capability specific to Sardina FishOS). We will be upgrading to Ocata in the coming months. We have found that in cloud, it is critical to separate the Operator role vs Consumer role. OpenStack is primarily Operator-facing, who are in turn providing the capabilities to serve certain Consumers. OpenStack enables the Operator to flexibly provide virtualized compute environment requested by the Consumer, while the Consumer does not care how the compute environment is provided by the Operator. With this view, lots of things become clear. Granted, not everyone in the OpenStack world have this view, but we are sure glad that we do from the early on! Our deployment is not the largest, but we aren't small either (several hundred hypervisors). We are an organization of several 10's of thousand people, though the user base at the moment is still in the hundreds. A number of comments here mentioned that they had live migration problems. We have not had these problems. It worked from the very beginning for us. Our view was that we would work with a vendor on OpenStack, rather than trying to string together the parts, in the same way that we don't string together the parts that make up a Linux distribution. FishOS makes it simple for us -- and that's before looking at operational tools in the product. I have not been involved in the commercial terms, but my understanding is that commercially we have TCO that would be hard to match otherwise.
- kiallmacinnes 9y ago
  As someone who used to work on OpenStack as 100% of my day job for 3-4 years, this comment makes so much sense. People try and deploy OpenStack from sources, or even from Ubuntu's etc packaging. This isn't how you should do it.. You need an opnionated vendor who meets your needs.
traf68 9y ago
Worked for rs in the early 2000s. The culture was pretty cutthroat and it was the chiselers and greasy guys who moved up. I worked as a dc tech during the .com bust recovery period and the level of incompetence and the personalities I encountered led me to leave < 6 months. Any decent SA from my generation can code a one-off virtualization base without too much problem using kvm/qemu. LXC is a clean in-fit to that. Sounds like this is standard RS procedure. Fleece the idiots, use the willing, and promote the owlshit.

201 points by kefka 9y ago

holydude 9y ago

I never saw a compan benefitting from openstack.

karlkatzke 9y ago
I'm at one of the only companies I know of outside Rackspace that's running it in production. We're doing a very poor job of it; we never hit production with any effort to upgrade the cluster in the past three years, so we're still running Havana with Nova Network. The most likely upgrade path for us right now is VMWare 6.5.
- kefka 9y ago
  So are we. And so is another department in our org. Frankly, we're doing a piss poor job of it. Migrations don't happen even if manually ran, the compute nodes are already at capacity, even with the meagre VMs we use. I have kept pushing for Mesos myself. I see it as a good way forward. Openstack may be a technical good body of code... But in the end its too convoluted codebase and many moving parts to be effective in most deployments.
  - benley 9y ago
    Mesos isn't really a direct replacement for Openstack, but you're probably still right to be pushing for it. If you roll with Mesos you will still need to solve a bunch of lower-level infrastructure challenges: machine provisioning, basic system config management, storage management (if you want persistent volumes), fancy networking (if you want ip-per-container or any sort of network isolation), and so on. Like Openstack, Mesos brings its own set of new complications. Unlike Openstack, Mesos almost always increases efficiency of operations once it's in use. Openstack always seems to result in more and more effort spent on just operating Openstack...
    - kefka 9y ago
      Too true that Mesos isn't a drop-in replacement. Far from it. There is quite a lot of complexity as well in Mesos.. But looking at it, there are also less moving parts with Mesos compared to OpenStack. As a test, I set up a Mesos Cluster in 3 VM's. It wasn't terribly hard at all. But at work, we had an alarm thrown in nagios about critical ram consumption on a node. So I go and do the migrate. It works.... And it doesn't. It migrated the VM to the same node. I had to do 2 extra flags to tell OpenStack to migrate the node properly. That's just ridiculous, and dumb. And not to mention, but Mesos supports proper handling of VMs and migration. It frustrates me to no end the amount of hand-holding I have to do with anything OpenStack based. Whereas Mesos was "Install, configure, run".. With a large amount of work on Configure.
- SEJeff 9y ago
  Do you work at eBay, because they run kubernetes ontop of openstack, which sounds a bit awful if you really think about it all.
  - kefka 9y ago
    Not really. Kubernetes is stupidly unstable. When I was testing it a while back, the master processes kept dying for no good reason and leaving half-on processes with no networking. And then you get to restart everything. Yay. Whereas if Kubernetes is on something else (OpenStack/Mesos) you at least have control to restart Kubernetes when it shits its brick.
    - specialp 9y ago
      The "a while back" qualifier here is important. Both Mesos and Kubernetes are relatively new projects in a rapidly moving space. FWIW we are running Kubernetes 1.4x with multiple redundant masters in production with no problems. We are also running Mesos/Marathon internally. These projects did have major issues early on but now they are becoming much more robust. For control we are using CoreOS with kube-aws. It actually works quite nicely as we can scale and upgrade running clusters. The only issue with it right now is upgrading and managing etcd. I think the whole issue with OpenStack is the overambitious goal to be a one stop from bare metal servers and switches to applications. Kubernetes with Flannel or Calico can take care of the software level networking and provisioning, while there are a lot of other ways to provision VMs for running Mesos or Kubernetes depending on where you are deploying.
      - traf68 9y ago
        Kubernetes and the push for it is religious. Get out of here with that. Not all of us have been industry < 10 years
        SEJeff 9y ago
        I've been in "the industry" professionally since ~2005, and with Linux since 1998 or so. I have a business need for kubernetes and there is nothing at all religious about it. It is simply that we have lots of new applications that need to be spun up and deployed. They might need to scale up or scale down, and we have gobs and gobs of on-premise (read 0 cloud) new hardware. "API Driven" infrastructure is the best way to achieve a better story for the various ops teams, and so we're building out some kubernetes clusters globally for them. In other news: http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/facebook/001/044/247/297.png http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/facebook/001/044/247/297...
- praneshp 9y ago
  Huh, it's that bad for you? I used to work in the Openstack team at Yahoo, and thanks to the efforts of my colleagues, the first thing we got out of the way was upgrades. One of my friends made Anvil[0] We stayed with the community till the SVP decided it was time to move all of Yahoo to AWS. I always wonder if one of Openstack's weaknesses was also the same thing that was it's strength, it's openness and need to support everything, as well as remaining agnostic to users. Nearly every company I know needs to register VMs on a local DB of some sort, and has patches on Openstack to do that. But every time I went on IRC and asked if we should think about a nicer way of providing this hook, I'd either be redirected to a different project, or get some rude replies. I also wish there were some more modern companies behind the project; a lot of the developers were probably under pressure from penny pinchers in the management. That said, it was a terrific project to start my career on. [0]: https://github.com/openstack/anvil https://github.com/openstack/anvil
- justinhensley 9y ago
  Are you using TripleO/Red Hat Platform Director? Can you share the size of your OpenStack environment? When you say VMware 6.5, are you referring to ESXi aka vSphere Hypervisor? That is not a 1 for 1 replacement of OpenStack.
  - karlkatzke 9y ago
    No, we're not. Our environment is small; only about 100 VMs. We're a Debian shop, so no redhat. No, it's not a 1:1 replacement. It's a migration. It would also be a migration if we decided to upgrade OpenStack, because we'd be going Havana -> Ocata. However, there are defined upgrade paths for ESX, we already have ESXi/vSphere in our environment, and we can hire someone relatively inexpensively to help us with vSphere if we need to augment our staff. Folks who understand Openstack are not anywhere near as easy to find and pay.
- cr0sh 9y ago
  I worked for a company (Nobis Technology Group) that was acquired by LeaseWeb USA; I was a part of the "server automation" team and was somewhat reluctantly "forced out" of the team after the transition (they basically offered to pay me a smaller salary to work for them - do I look stupid?). The team was essentially dissolved several months later, as I knew it would be. But for the short period I was there (about 2 years), it was a great place to work, and a high point in my total career. Prior to that position, I had been doing web development in PHP pretty much exclusively. Doing server automation was a completely new space to me. Soon after starting, our team was tasked with a migration to OpenStack. Since our current infrastructure front-end was already based on PHP, I got tasked with looking into how or if we could use PHP OpenCloud to work with OpenStack. It seemed workable to me; I was able to extend the classes in such a way using namespaces and other techniques so that we could add additional capabilities to the interface that weren't already supported (and there were a lot of holes to fill!), but wouldn't break things if/when we had to upgrade OpenCloud (this was ultimately tested a couple times I was there, and the changes proved flawless - at least on the PHP side). Ultimately, we had a nice stable front-end that worked well with both our original system (some VM architecture that I forget) and the new "cloud" infrastructure based around OpenStack. In effect, a user could deploy either an actual server (if available), provision a VM (if a server was available), or build a cloud server "system" from a myriad of parts (we tried to support and provide as much access to the OpenStack stuff as we could). We also had a RESTful API for clients to also used (some of our clients resold our services under their own names). Some of the backend stuff was a bit "messy" in how it worked (I won't go into details, but I "authored" a fake "O'Reilly" "book" (really just a front "cover" mainly) whose mascot was dickbutt) - but despite the mess, overall it worked well, considering all the moving parts (where it would tend to fall down - not always, but enough - was when an upgrade to OpenStack was performed). In short - we were also one of the few companies running OpenStack in production. Our owners ended up selling to LeaseWeb, I left - but the idea was that LeaseWeb wanted to transition things to their API and system, and I honestly don't know what happened with all the work and such I was involved in on the PHP side of things (there was also a point where me and a coworker had to quickly ramp up and learn GoLang to make an interface from Rancher/Docker over to the Nobis API - that was a fun and interesting experience). I imagine that some portion is still running, but who knows. I personally think that in the right hands and with the right infrastructure OpenStack can be a very workable and working technology. It seemed to work well for the systems we used while I was at Nobis. I don't know honestly whether you could use it to scale up to anything like AWS or Google's offerings, but I think for medium-sized stuff like we were doing (or like Digital Ocean does - who at the time was our direct competition), it can work well - at least as I experienced things.
SSLy 9y ago
att runs it in-house and they seem to like it.
- praneshp 9y ago
  I was at their keynote in one of the Openstack summit. I can guarantee that at least the VP that spoke about it knows nothing about openstack, and were just using Mirantis to deploy. They just threw Buzzwords around, one of which was Fuel[0] [0]: https://www.mirantis.com/software/openstack/fuel/ https://www.mirantis.com/software/openstack/fuel/
  - AndyNemmity 9y ago
    That's VPs for you, I wouldn't want our understanding of openstack to be judged by VPs either...
    - praneshp 9y ago
      Oh, to be clear, his knowledge of Openstack was thin, even for a vp
p932 9y ago
Apparently RedHat does: http://www.serverwatch.com/server-news/red-hat-growing-million-dollar-openstack-deals.html http://www.serverwatch.com/server-news/red-hat-growing-milli... https://investors.redhat.com/~/media/Files/R/Red-Hat-IR/documents/events/q4-2016-earnings-call-prep-remarks.pdf https://investors.redhat.com/~/media/Files/R/Red-Hat-IR/docu...
AndyNemmity 9y ago
We're running Openstack with Kubernetes and it's working quite well. Lots of challenges though, and we're just exiting a preview phase into production.
- kiranmova 9y ago
  How are you deploying? Are you using Tectonic? https://coreos.com/openstack/ https://coreos.com/openstack/
justinhensley 9y ago
I have seen several successful implementations in the 18 months I've been working with OpenStack. There are definitely gotchas and low level (driver, hardware)issues you have to deal with. I never thought I would be so familiar with IPMI. That said, OpenStack is an ambitious product. It essentially seeks to give you a lot of the functionality of AWS, except with on-premise infrastructure. That is a tall order. AWS is a multi-billion dollar effort that I assume has has far more engineers than the OpenStack project. OpenStack is a complex solution to a very complex problem. Having worked with other commercial IaaS solutions, I will say I hands down prefer OpenStack to the others I've worked with. If there is a private cloud solution that delivers the same/similar functionality of OpenStack with less admin overhead and more simplicity, then I want to hear about it.

iamthepieman 9y ago

the article mentions other big players pulling out or cutting jobs/funding related to OpenStack in recent months in addition to this latest move by Intel. Is this related to some endemic problem with the technology, big egos within the project, dominance by another outside player or what? Cursory searching doesn't reveal any "big thing". Maybe it's just dying a death by a thousand cuts.

api 9y ago
I don't know about today, but a few years ago I tried to set it up and found it to be an uninstallable massive ball of twine and chewing gum. It was shockingly clunky. I can't imagine running something like that in production. I suppose it'd be good job security for a lot of sysadmins.
- throwasehasdwi 9y ago
  I saw the same. It had great promise but was cobbled together poorly enough that nobody wants their name on it anymore :(
- eropple 9y ago
  It hasn't improved much, at least not of three months ago. Automating the rollout of any particularly is a Herculean task and even doing it by hand is onerous. Devstack works. Sort of. Poorly. Everything else is pay-a-consultant territory.
- AndyNemmity 9y ago
  I just moved into an openstack development job, and I'm struggling. So many technologies and complexities you have to keep in mind, even within a single project. I'm hoping it comes together soon. I have not provided a ton of value yet just sitting here learning, and breaking so many things.
  - justinhensley 9y ago
    It is a lot to ingest. Can you elaborate on the OpenStack development you are doing? OpenStack refers to a number of different projects (Nova, Neutron, Horizon, etc). I would advise getting a high level understanding of how Nova, Neutron, and Cinder/Swift interoperate. Then drill in to Neutron. As with every other cloud platform I've worked with, most of the IaaS complexity lies in Networking, in my opinion. Neutron, and SDN in general, is a fairly complex topic depending on your experience with network architecture and administration.

micah_chatt 9y ago

Is there any chance that vendors (like Intel) will care less about the API for accessing their products, as there seems to be more consolidation around API's for running applications like Kubernetes. Intel is a member of the CNCF [1] and seems to be putting money behind it. Am I reading too much into that and is Intel just a big company that puts money in lots of places? [1]: https://www.cncf.io/about/members/ https://www.cncf.io/about/members/

throwasehasdwi 9y ago
Intel's new bread and butter is the server space. They are doing everything possible to make sure they stay on the forefront. With the slowdown of single threaded scaling Intel knows that performance improvements for consumers in the near future will be increasingly anemic. Servers and ML are two spaces where increasing core counts still makes sense.
detaro 9y ago
They have an interest in a large server ecosystem in general, with options for running your own infrastructure, because it's a lot more profitable for them to sell server CPUs to many companies that don't have as much options to pressure them on price as e.g. Amazon can, and to get their special features integrated so they can use them as arguments against other CPU vendors. They don't care as much which option wins, so it makes sense to be involved with anything that seems important.
benballjr 9y ago
It's probably a little of everything. Intel does put a lot of resources into projects like Kubernetes and other communities adjacent to Linux Foundation / CNCF, but I think they put a lot of money anywhere they see a future for utilizing their products... and I think that gets little abstract, sorta. Or rather, they invest in some things that seem like they're partially related to a lot of their core interests.

twelvenmonkeys 9y ago

Is there an alternative out there for OpenStack? Perhaps a minimalist version?

jmedefind 9y ago
We're using Joyent's Triton platform and like it a lot. It's been super stable and great for us. Plus #smartos has been incredibly responsive and helpful with any problems we run into. There is also Proxmox and Cloudstack.
- unethical_ban 9y ago
  Is Joyent's documentation less than three years old yet? I wanted to dive into Joyent but their wiki was skeletal. To make my comment more useful: I'm hearing good things about Proxmox and will likely lab it up soon. r/homelab has some feedback on it as well.
  - jmedefind 9y ago
    Their docs site has always been decent enough for us. https://docs.joyent.com/private-cloud https://docs.joyent.com/private-cloud Anything missing or questionable could usually be resolved by looking in the docs folder of the corresponding service's github repo.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
Nux 9y ago
Cloudstack, OpenNebula - though they are not minimalist.
X86BSD 9y ago
So depending on your use case, some of you might be very interested in CloudABI. See: https://nuxi.nl https://nuxi.nl to solve some of your issues. Ed is a FreeBSD committer and has been working on solving some of the harder problems relating to security and god I hate to use this word but "containers" or "containerization" of applications. If you write your app to the CloudABI spec it will run on any of the supported platforms. The video of his presentation at the 32C3 conference does a much better job explaining it. It's certainly worth your time to watch.

rectang 9y ago

Consortiums are inherently unstable. Marketing interests drive wild swings in participation and funding. Open governance by individuals is much more stable. That stability benefits both individuals (whose stake is not vaporized when they change employers) and businesses (who are more insulated from impulsive moves by big players).

driverdan 9y ago

Sites with autoplay videos should be banned.

benley 9y ago
I very much agree. Clicked link, read five words, site started screaming some garbage advertising at me, closed tab immediately. It's not even the video that bothers me so much - it's the autoplay audio that causes me to immediately close the tab and never return to a site. Ugh.
- kefka 9y ago
  Yeah, I looked for another link that didn't have such obnoxious refuse... Id' be game if you can find a less spammy site. But when I submitted this an hour ago, there wasn't any.
  - benley 9y ago
    For what it's worth, it's fortune.com that annoyed me, not your link to it. Thanks for looking for alternatives at least :-)
RubenSandwich 9y ago
I've recently started using this Chrome Plugin to disable autoplay: https://github.com/Eloston/disable-html5-autoplay https://github.com/Eloston/disable-html5-autoplay. So far works about 95% of the time, but it recently became unmaintained. It also does not distinguish between when you click on a video and the next link plays it, e.g. Following a link to a YouTube Video or Netflix show.
- Profragile 9y ago
  I just use Scriptsafe to block everything.

xemdetia 9y ago

From someone not very invested in the OpenStack process it feels like all the momentum of the recent push of the project just withered away all at once. I am not sure if the container crowd ate it's lunch, where containerized appliances just solve the problem of openstack better.

kashyapc 9y ago
[Disclosure: I spend a (not too large) _portion_ of my time on the OpenStack Compute project, so adjust my comments for bias.] Please. You seem to be making the same mistake, that many make on blogs and news websites, of exclaiming "containers are the future!" while both VMs and containers have their place and use-cases. I'd rather suggest you read the below. (Since I'm linking to a blog, quick background about the author: Rich is one of the long-time contributors of KVM-based Virtualization stack and the lead author / maintainer of libguestfs.org) https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2013/06/19/the-boring-truth-full-virtualization-and-containerization-both-have-their-place/ https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2013/06/19/the-boring-truth-full-...
- foobiekr 9y ago
  VMs have their place, but a lot of what kind of built the OpenStack hype engine - dynamic workload deployment and multitenant-style management - also is what driving the (also partly aspirational) deployment of containers. The thing is, though, they are at odds. Enterprises don't have nearly the dynamic workload set that people thought but where they legitimately have some is in devops style development. And if you have container management, which you do, then highly dynamic VM management is much less valuable.
- xemdetia 9y ago
  I am not really claiming containers are the future, but from someone who is actively working on a network appliance I have people asking me at least twice a month about containers to put my product in (from people who are already managing 10k+ systems and wanting to simplify deployment). I have heard zero buzz about OpenStack except during a SVP drive by about a year ago. Most of the customer sites I interact with on the high end just end up baking their own system images tied to a SSO solution and just manage it with VMWare/Ansible/something homegrown. On the low end people just don't deal with OpenStack at all and just do it the hard way with a VMWare or KVM style solution. For either side of that equation containerization is a faster value-add. From the other side what people ask me about cloud integration is more feature-driven of particular clouds than anything else. I'm just not seeing the momentum in the field.

atarian 9y ago

The article just mentions that Intel is no longer funding OSIC, which from what I read is essentially a data center for contributors to use (for free?). I could totally see why Intel would have second thoughts about footing a server bill; I don't think it means they're officially out of OpenStack.

ajdlinux 9y ago
My understanding is that the OSIC program also included funding for Rackspace + Intel OpenStack developers, some proportion of whom will probably be losing their jobs out of this I imagine.

foobiekr 9y ago

OpenStack really has a bunch of problems. The big one is that OpenStack is about building and operating your own Rackspace; this is not something IT organizations can even hire for let alone carry off. The idea that they could/would/should was purely aspirational. The others are that it's basically a mess - no two OS deployments will look the same - and that it has neither an operational advantage nor too much of a pricing advantage (50% for RHAT) over VMware - which is better integrated and much, much better from a admin experience and debuggability standpoint. I looked hard at leveraging OpenStack for the service we were building but the underlying code was often cringetastic and somewhat naive. At some level if you run software as a service you can work around poor code quality - something friends from AWS have emphasized - but you can't throw it over the wall and have other people without large engineering staffs there to help run it - which doesn't work in the small. VMware is the opposite approach - the entire model and practices evolved out of arm's reach software sales and support. So naturally it works better.

mattbee 9y ago
As a small competitor to Racksapce in 2010, designing a replacement for our (then) 8-year old VM structure, Bytemark bet against Openstack from the 1st announcement and spent years building something the-same-but-different. It wasn't _just_ that Openstack was unreleased and talking about foundations and making grand promises without any production-grade code. It was just that we could never work out which version Rackspace was actually running for their actual customers, and the details of how to actually _deploy_ it and make it work seemed enormously fiddly compared to VMWare, which was where they were taking aim. I expected them to say "now running on Openstack, 100%!" Also the design seemed to mirror AWS, as if the only answer to their dominance was to ... copy every facility they were producing exactly? We had a more definite vision of where VMs should go, and thought it was a bad plan to aim at "Amazon, but smaller!". In particular we really really wanted live migrations to be a part of our platform - where we really really cared about uptime of individual VMs, and wanted people to be able to upgrade them on the fly. Plus, y'know, for a hosting company, being in control of, and having opinions of our hosting platform was what people paid us for! So we designed our in-house platform BigV instead (now Bytemark Cloud Servers) -> https://blog.bytemark.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/DesignAndImplementationOfBigV.pdf https://blog.bytemark.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Desig... [pdf] And even though we (re)invented an NBD server to make all the live migration stuff work https://github.com/BytemarkHosting/flexnbd-c https://github.com/BytemarkHosting/flexnbd-c I believe we've ended up with something that does a small number of things far better. I see people asking whether Openstack is actually running anywhere very public, and have read some pained war stories. So it still feels like the right decision, even before this announcement. Plus it seems like live migration in Openstack is still an exotic and difficult option, whereas that's been our standard practice for years. There are plenty of problems running your own hosting stack, but I like that we can solve our own problems on our own terms, and tie software decisions to hardware or data centre decisions that we make at the same time. I eye up Kubernetes & Ganeti every few months, but they keep reminding me that if you've got the expertise, and a specific purpose in mind, you can usually build something that fits your purpose more closely. (though the second half of that sentence will probably be written on my self-carved tombstone)

turnip1979 9y ago

I am sad to see these negative events as someone who was in the openstack community. But I think a lot of folks knew such stuff was going to happen. I think the mistakes made were: 1) the so-called big tent approach 2) too much complexity 3) core projects not listening to end-users, and focusing too much on the plug-in model It is a shame because there were so many smart and hard working folks involved. It really felt like a community experience.

kordless 9y ago

I ran an OpenStack cluster in my house for a few years. The deployment was managed by a bunch of scripts which I wrote and published to help others learn the basics in deploying an OpenStack cluster, sans most of the more complicated networking stuff. Last count, about 25K unique IPs downloaded the images used in those scripts to launch test instances. At one time I held the top 3rd or 4th link on Google for "openstack install". A few years ago, I leveraged a bunch of methods in OpenStack to build a thing which would launch instances based on Bitcoin payments to certain preloaded addresses. These addresses allowed "templates" to be associated with cluster capabilities and code to be deployed. Payments to that address in Bitcoin would immediately net you an instance, of a certain type, on someone's infrastructure. The general idea behind this creation was a way to abstract hardware components into a system by which applications could launch themselves and utilize the resources provided in a fair, secure and trustworthy way. It is my belief this model was WAY ahead of it's time, a precursor to the hybrid models we see emerging today, and lead directly to my personal realization that federation of all systems will be a basic requirement for implementing trusted computing in the future. We're going to need it with AI. Not sure how I know that, but there it is, irrationality and all. Unfortunately, standardizing deployment methodologies doesn't net you federation. Standardization itself doesn't net you trust, unless everyone can agree on the standard, which is out of necessity done in an non-trustworthy way. Votes of a board, for example, aren't represented with fair consensus, unless there's an algorithm behind the votes. Otherwise, votes end up being slightly irrational, because people behind the votes are slightly irrational. Or very irrational, depending on the company they work for. And yes, federation can be implemented in a trustworthy way by a corporation, such as Google or Amazon, but that requires all people in that federation (a discrete group) agree they will use this thing to implement trust, even though the thing may not actually have trust implemented in a rational way (i.e. by algorithm). At the end of the day, OpenStack was doomed not because of container tech, or the structure of the board, or who ran the biggest cluster, or because it was overly complicated for simple use cases. It failed because it did not implement the basic requirement of delivering trusted infrastructure in a scalable and trustworthy way across a broad range of infrastructure, in a wide range of locations, and do so in a way that separates the use of the infras from the irrationality of humans running the infra. Until something does that, and does it well, we're stuck with Google, Amazon and other provider's solutions. This is also a good rationalization for the continued increase of cloud services by companies and the continued emergence of hybrid models in the future.

timeu 9y ago

We (scientific research institute) are currently operating a relatively small commercially supported Openstack (Liberty release) installation next to our HPC infrastructure and so far it works quite well. Of course, because we are using Openstack from a commercial vendor, the installation/provisioning is quite straightforward (although there is quite a bit of complexity, if you want to do a lot of adjustments). So far we didn't have any big troubles during operations and our users (researchers) have started to use it (creating VMs for specific applications). We will hopefully upgrade soon to the Newton release which will enable us to provide SaaS (Murano) and CaaS (Magnum) to the users. We will probably also evaluate Openshift on top of Openstack. The biggest pain points is the integration with our existing HPC infrastructure (specifically the parallel filesystem/storage). We haven't really looked much at the code except of debugging some authentication issues, when we tried to integrate keystone with our core IT's AD, so we can't comment on that. Additionally, the official openstack documentation (the commercially supported one is quite superficial) is often very confusing and it's very hard to find proper CHANGELOGS for each of the openstack components. Also we really don't like (or rather despise) openstack's issue tracker (Launchpad). It is very hard to find any existing issues, when we encounter some problems.

spotinsun 9y ago

At our facility, we have an OpenStack-based private cloud that we worked with Sardina Systems to put in place. It is production and we have not had any problems with it. We have also undergone upgrade from Mitaka to Newton with zero-downtime and completed within a day (I understand that zero-downtime upgrade is a capability specific to Sardina FishOS). We will be upgrading to Ocata in the coming months. We have found that in cloud, it is critical to separate the Operator role vs Consumer role. OpenStack is primarily Operator-facing, who are in turn providing the capabilities to serve certain Consumers. OpenStack enables the Operator to flexibly provide virtualized compute environment requested by the Consumer, while the Consumer does not care how the compute environment is provided by the Operator. With this view, lots of things become clear. Granted, not everyone in the OpenStack world have this view, but we are sure glad that we do from the early on! Our deployment is not the largest, but we aren't small either (several hundred hypervisors). We are an organization of several 10's of thousand people, though the user base at the moment is still in the hundreds. A number of comments here mentioned that they had live migration problems. We have not had these problems. It worked from the very beginning for us. Our view was that we would work with a vendor on OpenStack, rather than trying to string together the parts, in the same way that we don't string together the parts that make up a Linux distribution. FishOS makes it simple for us -- and that's before looking at operational tools in the product. I have not been involved in the commercial terms, but my understanding is that commercially we have TCO that would be hard to match otherwise.

kiallmacinnes 9y ago
As someone who used to work on OpenStack as 100% of my day job for 3-4 years, this comment makes so much sense. People try and deploy OpenStack from sources, or even from Ubuntu's etc packaging. This isn't how you should do it.. You need an opnionated vendor who meets your needs.

traf68 9y ago

Worked for rs in the early 2000s. The culture was pretty cutthroat and it was the chiselers and greasy guys who moved up. I worked as a dc tech during the .com bust recovery period and the level of incompetence and the personalities I encountered led me to leave < 6 months. Any decent SA from my generation can code a one-off virtualization base without too much problem using kvm/qemu. LXC is a clean in-fit to that. Sounds like this is standard RS procedure. Fleece the idiots, use the willing, and promote the owlshit.