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Secret History of OpenStack, the Free Cloud Software That’s Changing Everything

67 points by daegloe 15y ago

zmanji 15y ago
“Whenever I would talk in Washington about this cloud technology enabling data centers to run without people, this was interpreted as jobs going away,” Kemp says. “There was a serious political challenge to the project…and I was called before the NASA administrator — of the whole agency — to explain it.” This is disturbing to say the least.
- dpritchett 15y ago
  Anecdotal counterpoint: I worked much of my graduate assistantship in C.S. at Shelby Hall, named for the senator cited in the article as leading the charge against OpenStack. http://www.bama.ua.edu/~chem/facilities/buildings/shelby.html http://www.bama.ua.edu/~chem/facilities/buildings/shelby.htm...
  - rbarooah 15y ago
    How is that a counterpoint?
    - dpritchett 15y ago
      My graduate STEM education and paid job was partially funded by the guy. He's not entirely out to stifle innovation.
bretpiatt 15y ago
Well written piece, as accurate as anything that has been published to date. The title is a bit sensationalist (though I suppose that is what gets readers) -- none of this has been kept secret, it just hasn't been told on a stage the size of Wired before.
- sparkycollier 15y ago
  I do wish you'd gotten props, Bret, for your work in creating the openstack case at Rackspace that we took to the board, and for your work in building the ecosystem! We couldn't have done it without you, no doubt about it.
  - toomuchtodo 15y ago
    As an OpenStack user with several PB in production, thank you!
ebbv 15y ago
A nice read and informative about the background of OpenStack, but doesn't really give the reader any information about what state OpenStack is really in and what trying to use it is like. I work for a small to medium sized web hosting company and we looked into using OpenStack as a solution for offering a Cloud product, and the problem is that OpenStack is very much in a dough-like state. It's great if you want to bake your own solution. But if what you need is bread to build a sandwich on, you're going to be starting a lot further back in the proces than you maybe want to. I also fundamentally disagree with the whole direction of playing chase with Amazon. Linux didn't supplant Windows by copying it; it supplanted Windows by offering something that was better. If Linux had merely been free and Windows compatible, I don't think it would be the success it is today. It was not just free and open, but also technically superior. I think OpenStack had -- and may still have -- an opportunity to provide a much better platform than what Amazon has. EC2 has a lot of design flaws and faults which result not from technical limitation but just bad design choices, and there's no need for OpenStack to follow in them. The biggest of them in my mind is the flavor issue. In the EC2/OpenStack model, you cannot have customers spool up VMs with arbitrary specs; they must choose from available flavors. So that means if you want to offer a wide variety of options, you have to have many, many flavors on option. Which then leads to the customer having to pick one of them -- or to obfuscate this issue behind an interface which can match up the user's choices with the appropriate flavor. Neither of which is a good solution. There's no reason a cloud VM platform should have this kind of restriction. Other competing platforms don't. I think OpenStack will eventually be supplanted by something much better. It's just that this is a very new industry, much more like competing computing platforms in the 1970's than the much more mature battle that happened in the 1990's. Where even though Linux was new, it was based on 25+ years of prior work and experience.
- wmf 15y ago
  I agree that IaaS can be done much better. The networking and storage that's available is terrible; it's worse than ESX 1.5. In the EC2/OpenStack model, you cannot have customers spool up VMs with arbitrary specs; they must choose from available flavors. Are you talking about sizes? If you allow arbitrary sizes or CPU:RAM ratios you'll get fragmentation which you have to recoup by charging higher prices. If VMs are 1/2^Nth of a server, you can use a buddy allocator.
SoftwareMaven 15y ago
We recently moved our app from AWS to Rackspace because of OpenStack. If we are successful, we know we want to run on our own hardware, but to get a sense of the market is too expensive using dedicated hardware. Rackspace and OpenStack gives us a way to test the waters using a cloud provider, then take ownership of the whole ball of wax later, without massive disruption to the software development effort.
- ridruejo 15y ago
  You can do the same with Eucalyptus http://www.eucalyptus.com http://www.eucalyptus.com
tybris 15y ago
Interesting, but a big risk is that generic interfaces/software will limit functionality and lead to suboptimal performance. Amazon can roll out a new kind of hyper-advanced SSD-based database with some awkard custom interface any day of the week because they control the hardware, software, and API. You just cannot do that if your software runs in hundreds of different environments you cannot control.
bostonvaulter2 15y ago
Anyone have more info about these communal software houses? They sound pretty interesting.
jmitcheson 15y ago
Can anyone comment on the main difference between this and Cloud Foundry?

67 points by daegloe 15y ago

“Whenever I would talk in Washington about this cloud technology enabling data centers to run without people, this was interpreted as jobs going away,” Kemp says. “There was a serious political challenge to the project…and I was called before the NASA administrator — of the whole agency — to explain it.” This is disturbing to say the least.

dpritchett 15y ago
Anecdotal counterpoint: I worked much of my graduate assistantship in C.S. at Shelby Hall, named for the senator cited in the article as leading the charge against OpenStack. http://www.bama.ua.edu/~chem/facilities/buildings/shelby.html http://www.bama.ua.edu/~chem/facilities/buildings/shelby.htm...
- rbarooah 15y ago
  How is that a counterpoint?
  - dpritchett 15y ago
    My graduate STEM education and paid job was partially funded by the guy. He's not entirely out to stifle innovation.

bretpiatt 15y ago

Well written piece, as accurate as anything that has been published to date. The title is a bit sensationalist (though I suppose that is what gets readers) -- none of this has been kept secret, it just hasn't been told on a stage the size of Wired before.

sparkycollier 15y ago
I do wish you'd gotten props, Bret, for your work in creating the openstack case at Rackspace that we took to the board, and for your work in building the ecosystem! We couldn't have done it without you, no doubt about it.
- toomuchtodo 15y ago
  As an OpenStack user with several PB in production, thank you!

ebbv 15y ago

A nice read and informative about the background of OpenStack, but doesn't really give the reader any information about what state OpenStack is really in and what trying to use it is like. I work for a small to medium sized web hosting company and we looked into using OpenStack as a solution for offering a Cloud product, and the problem is that OpenStack is very much in a dough-like state. It's great if you want to bake your own solution. But if what you need is bread to build a sandwich on, you're going to be starting a lot further back in the proces than you maybe want to. I also fundamentally disagree with the whole direction of playing chase with Amazon. Linux didn't supplant Windows by copying it; it supplanted Windows by offering something that was better. If Linux had merely been free and Windows compatible, I don't think it would be the success it is today. It was not just free and open, but also technically superior. I think OpenStack had -- and may still have -- an opportunity to provide a much better platform than what Amazon has. EC2 has a lot of design flaws and faults which result not from technical limitation but just bad design choices, and there's no need for OpenStack to follow in them. The biggest of them in my mind is the flavor issue. In the EC2/OpenStack model, you cannot have customers spool up VMs with arbitrary specs; they must choose from available flavors. So that means if you want to offer a wide variety of options, you have to have many, many flavors on option. Which then leads to the customer having to pick one of them -- or to obfuscate this issue behind an interface which can match up the user's choices with the appropriate flavor. Neither of which is a good solution. There's no reason a cloud VM platform should have this kind of restriction. Other competing platforms don't. I think OpenStack will eventually be supplanted by something much better. It's just that this is a very new industry, much more like competing computing platforms in the 1970's than the much more mature battle that happened in the 1990's. Where even though Linux was new, it was based on 25+ years of prior work and experience.

wmf 15y ago
I agree that IaaS can be done much better. The networking and storage that's available is terrible; it's worse than ESX 1.5. In the EC2/OpenStack model, you cannot have customers spool up VMs with arbitrary specs; they must choose from available flavors. Are you talking about sizes? If you allow arbitrary sizes or CPU:RAM ratios you'll get fragmentation which you have to recoup by charging higher prices. If VMs are 1/2^Nth of a server, you can use a buddy allocator.

SoftwareMaven 15y ago

We recently moved our app from AWS to Rackspace because of OpenStack. If we are successful, we know we want to run on our own hardware, but to get a sense of the market is too expensive using dedicated hardware. Rackspace and OpenStack gives us a way to test the waters using a cloud provider, then take ownership of the whole ball of wax later, without massive disruption to the software development effort.

ridruejo 15y ago
You can do the same with Eucalyptus http://www.eucalyptus.com http://www.eucalyptus.com

tybris 15y ago

Interesting, but a big risk is that generic interfaces/software will limit functionality and lead to suboptimal performance. Amazon can roll out a new kind of hyper-advanced SSD-based database with some awkard custom interface any day of the week because they control the hardware, software, and API. You just cannot do that if your software runs in hundreds of different environments you cannot control.

bostonvaulter2 15y ago

Anyone have more info about these communal software houses? They sound pretty interesting.

jmitcheson 15y ago

Can anyone comment on the main difference between this and Cloud Foundry?