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Openstack was supposed to be a vendor based consultant bonanza. It wasn't designed by or for the users or customers, if it was designed at all. Instead it was

Openstack was supposed to be a vendor based consultant bonanza. It wasn't designed by or for the users or customers, if it was designed at all. Instead it was a vehicle for hardware vendors to sell compatible product and consultants to build something they'd have to service forever afterwards. (Yes this is a cynical and half joking take, but it's also serious) So what went wrong? Welll, If you're not going to build a product that teams can actually figure out how to use, then you need to have Cisco or Oracle level sales talent behind it. OpenStack didn't have that, and maybe couldn't have it because there wasn't one boss company behind the product. Like I mentioned, there is a trade-off between the usability and required Sales Power. As far as usability goes, even consultancies that were directed to use and sell OpenStack solutions couldn't get their people to figure it out. A consultancy based technology has to be coherent enough that a junior associate can reasonably start billing hours for it. OpenStack will stymie a close-knit team of veteran "devops" people— And I'm talking about people who actually know systems administration and development, not a buzz word ninja.

yeukhon 10y ago
Yeah, but that was supposed to be Redhat, since Redhat is the largest sponsor behind Openstack.
bonzini 10y ago
The problem is that "consulting bonanza" with open source software is really hard to do. It is really, really hard to draw a line between what is custom engineering and what is a non-upstream patch you will have to maintain forever. And that's why Red Hat's mantra is to do everything upstream first, even at the cost of sometimes delivering features later. Everybody got that completely wrong. Open source works, but you still have to understand how to engineer it. So far, companies that succeeded are mostly following an "open core" model where they control the core too (Atlassian, Automatic). Red Hat is the exception, and with Red Hat putting a lot of effort on upstream OpenStack development no one could pull off open core for OpenStack. Mirantis has plenty of non-upstream code and last I heard wants to sell SaaS to work around that. Plus, no one devoted the right amount of engineering to the lower levels of the stack (at least QEMU and libvirt). You cannot seriously expect to partner with vendors for guest operating systems without knowing all of the stack---this was something else that Mirantis and others missed. So the problem was not that OpenStack was bad, it was that everybody thought open source is magic. But it isn't magic, and if it looks like magic, it means you don't understand it.

yeukhon 10y ago

Yeah, but that was supposed to be Redhat, since Redhat is the largest sponsor behind Openstack.

bonzini 10y ago

The problem is that "consulting bonanza" with open source software is really hard to do. It is really, really hard to draw a line between what is custom engineering and what is a non-upstream patch you will have to maintain forever. And that's why Red Hat's mantra is to do everything upstream first, even at the cost of sometimes delivering features later. Everybody got that completely wrong. Open source works, but you still have to understand how to engineer it. So far, companies that succeeded are mostly following an "open core" model where they control the core too (Atlassian, Automatic). Red Hat is the exception, and with Red Hat putting a lot of effort on upstream OpenStack development no one could pull off open core for OpenStack. Mirantis has plenty of non-upstream code and last I heard wants to sell SaaS to work around that. Plus, no one devoted the right amount of engineering to the lower levels of the stack (at least QEMU and libvirt). You cannot seriously expect to partner with vendors for guest operating systems without knowing all of the stack---this was something else that Mirantis and others missed. So the problem was not that OpenStack was bad, it was that everybody thought open source is magic. But it isn't magic, and if it looks like magic, it means you don't understand it.