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Meanwhile, everyone wants to rave about OpenStack, a software particle-board designed by committee, consisting of floor sweepings and a lot of toxic glue. Not

by bronson 12y ago

Meanwhile, everyone wants to rave about OpenStack, a software particle-board designed by committee, consisting of floor sweepings and a lot of toxic glue. Not surprisingly, since it’s not a proper system, few OpenStack deployments exceed a dozen nodes. And in this, the world falls all over itself to “invest” billions of dollars. Finest description of OpenStack I've seen.

switch007 12y ago
(Open question) Is OpenStack that bad? I've heard it requires significant integration work (i.e. full time dev(s)), far from being an out-of-the-box product. What is the 'toxic glue'? Why (if true) do many deployments not exceed 12 nodes?
- alrs 12y ago
  I spent 18 months deploying Openstack inside a pretty broken huge company. Openstack is a disaster, because so many of the people building it have never used AWS and are instead trying to build "VMWare, but for free." Object storage is such an afterthought that there are regular rumblings that Swift shouldn't even be part of core Openstack. The six-month release cadence keeps delivering broken software. The releases are slushy enough that configuration options change mid-release, so you can't perform minor upgrades without potentially breaking something. The big companies backing Openstack are using it as a cloud story that they can present to Wall Street, or as a bargaining chip to get better terms from VMWare. Most of the Openstack startups have been aqui-hired, and life has moved on.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- alrs 12y ago
  A semi-dated but bang-on description of the problems behind Openstack written by Andrew Clay Shafer in 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8817534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8817534
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- ccibo 12y ago
  Depends on your perspective. If you think that grabbing source or pre-compiled bits and deploying it, like say, LINUX, you are going to be in for a rude awakening. Not easy, lots of architectural and configuration items to consider. For all intents and purposes you are attempting to build AWS or GCE from scratch. Its going to be complicated. OTOH, if you consider exactly what you are trying to solve for, pick a supported distort and go with that - the big players all focused on different verticals from the outset, and their strengths map to those niches. Many of them are pretty solid from an architecture, implementation, and support perspective. But in no way think that OS is a replacement for VMware...it just isn't.

by bronson 12y ago

switch007 12y ago

(Open question) Is OpenStack that bad? I've heard it requires significant integration work (i.e. full time dev(s)), far from being an out-of-the-box product. What is the 'toxic glue'? Why (if true) do many deployments not exceed 12 nodes?

alrs 12y ago
I spent 18 months deploying Openstack inside a pretty broken huge company. Openstack is a disaster, because so many of the people building it have never used AWS and are instead trying to build "VMWare, but for free." Object storage is such an afterthought that there are regular rumblings that Swift shouldn't even be part of core Openstack. The six-month release cadence keeps delivering broken software. The releases are slushy enough that configuration options change mid-release, so you can't perform minor upgrades without potentially breaking something. The big companies backing Openstack are using it as a cloud story that they can present to Wall Street, or as a bargaining chip to get better terms from VMWare. Most of the Openstack startups have been aqui-hired, and life has moved on.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
alrs 12y ago
A semi-dated but bang-on description of the problems behind Openstack written by Andrew Clay Shafer in 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8817534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8817534
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
ccibo 12y ago
Depends on your perspective. If you think that grabbing source or pre-compiled bits and deploying it, like say, LINUX, you are going to be in for a rude awakening. Not easy, lots of architectural and configuration items to consider. For all intents and purposes you are attempting to build AWS or GCE from scratch. Its going to be complicated. OTOH, if you consider exactly what you are trying to solve for, pick a supported distort and go with that - the big players all focused on different verticals from the outset, and their strengths map to those niches. Many of them are pretty solid from an architecture, implementation, and support perspective. But in no way think that OS is a replacement for VMware...it just isn't.