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This seems to be more of a lesson on the failures of community building vs. secrecy in the face of a presumed pile of money and the resulting vendor politics, t

This seems to be more of a lesson on the failures of community building vs. secrecy in the face of a presumed pile of money and the resulting vendor politics, than "OpenStack sucks". An OSS project isn't really supposed to be about "I can freeload on the works of others for some investment in comprehension and customization", which is how I felt the author framed his situation at times. The underlying failure seems to be that the author decided it was easier to maintain his own proprietary platform than modify OpenStack for their needs and contributing back to the community. This would lead to others to pick up their stuff down the road and potentially reducing the maintenance burden (at the expense of exposing any secret sauce you feel you might have). This deeper failure is In the incentives for Rackspace to withhold key commits on Ironic from the community because they feel it is secret sauce. (I am taking the OP's version of the tale at face value). They're one of the flagship supporters of OpenStack, and their behavior is perceptably a big reason for its failures to date. The limitations of Neurtron without a product like VMware NSX underneath are well known. Production grade virtual networking at scale is hard and also mostly a secret sauce (for now). OpenStack seems to effectively have become the OMG and CORBA 1.0 with a reference implementation - it's cloud vendor kabuki instead of distributed objects square dancing. You need vendor help to get going, and the portability is very limited, you'll get some value out of what's been done but at great effort. It seems to also be a useful commons for network and storage vendors to help drive interperability with the side modules (Cinder and Neutron). If anything, OpenStack is how the industry is desperately brute-force learning what Amazon Web Services has accomplished before they swallow the universe, which is valuable but messy. OpenStack seems the only "I want to run a general purpose cloud" game in town today - CloudStack exists but doesn't seem to have a lot of momentum. Google, Azure and Digital Ocean are the only competitors to AWS of note and they don't open source their stuff. CoreOS on PXE or Ubuntu MaaS might work but needs a much more mature cluster schedulers, network and volume management. Or perhaps the real next generation will be "none of the above".

hyperliner 12y ago
" 'I can freeload on the works of others for some investment in comprehension and customization', which is how I felt the author framed his situation at times. " That was a huge, unnecessary leap from your part. I did not read it like that. To me, it was more like "we were going to leverage the existing projects and add to that and give back (as they said they will do), but we could not because the underlying projects are not mature so right now it is more work to fix than to start from scratch." I don't know if what they did is advisable or not. All I am saying yours is an unnecessarily aggressive conclusion attacking someone who just spent a lot of time warning the community about a lot of the issues under discussion.
- parasubvert 12y ago
  I wasn't making any conclusions. What's aggressive or unnecessary about explaining how I felt when I read his article? You felt differently than I did reading it. Also, freeloading is, by far, how most people and organizations use open source, so it's not exactly a unique situation.
jroll 12y ago
> This deeper failure is In the incentives for Rackspace to withhold key commits on Ironic from the community because they feel it is secret sauce. (I am taking the OP's version of the tale at face value). They're one of the flagship supporters of OpenStack, and their behavior is perceptably a big reason for its failures to date. I'm an Ironic core reviewer and work on OnMetal at Rackspace. At Rackspace, we run ahead of Ironic trunk. It's true that we haven't been super vigilant about upstreaming our patches into Ironic; this is not because it's "secret sauce", not because we don't care. Priorities are hard, both upstream and downstream. OpenStack moves slowly compared to a team developing proprietary software. This is a well-known fact. We do our best to upstream our patches as quickly as the project allows, but they often need to be improved to work with other hardware/drivers/etc. For example, when we launched in July, we already had support for "cleaning" a server - erasing disks, flashing firmware, etc. The "spec" for the new feature was first posted upstream June 25, 2014.[0] This spec finally landed last January 16, 2015. Our work on improving network support in Ironic has been similar; the project hasn't been ready for it (again, priorities). It's been done in the open[1], but the code is not in Ironic trunk yet. We've been extremely open about what we're doing since we joined the Ironic project almost a year ago; I'm curious which patches the article has in mind. As an Ironic developer, this article bums me out a bit, but it's a good pointer as to what we're doing poorly. /me starts writing better docs [0] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/102685/ https://review.openstack.org/#/c/102685/ [1] https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/ironic-neutron-bonding https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/ironic-neutron-bonding
- parasubvert 12y ago
  This is excellent information, thanks for sharing it, and correcting my assumptions above.
- dlaube 12y ago
  I just wanted to chime in here to say that although there were several situations where our questions couldn't be answered, we probably wouldn't have made it as far with our testing if it wasn't for the answers that were received from the openstack ironic developers. I should also point out that I've always found the openstack ironic devs to be kind and professional. So be it as it may, it is unfortunate that there are some conflicting priorities but I certainly do not blame the devs.
xj9 12y ago
SmartDataCenter[1] was recently open sourced and is built on a lot of cool tech (ZFS, Dtrace, node.js, Illumos). [1]: https://github.com/joyent/sdc/ https://github.com/joyent/sdc/
- parasubvert 12y ago
  Good point, I have to remember that. I wish the world was more open to Illumos.
tjradcliffe 12y ago
> it's cloud vendor kabuki instead of distributed objects square dancing This is a beautiful and evocative metaphor.

hyperliner 12y ago

" 'I can freeload on the works of others for some investment in comprehension and customization', which is how I felt the author framed his situation at times. " That was a huge, unnecessary leap from your part. I did not read it like that. To me, it was more like "we were going to leverage the existing projects and add to that and give back (as they said they will do), but we could not because the underlying projects are not mature so right now it is more work to fix than to start from scratch." I don't know if what they did is advisable or not. All I am saying yours is an unnecessarily aggressive conclusion attacking someone who just spent a lot of time warning the community about a lot of the issues under discussion.

parasubvert 12y ago
I wasn't making any conclusions. What's aggressive or unnecessary about explaining how I felt when I read his article? You felt differently than I did reading it. Also, freeloading is, by far, how most people and organizations use open source, so it's not exactly a unique situation.

jroll 12y ago

> This deeper failure is In the incentives for Rackspace to withhold key commits on Ironic from the community because they feel it is secret sauce. (I am taking the OP's version of the tale at face value). They're one of the flagship supporters of OpenStack, and their behavior is perceptably a big reason for its failures to date. I'm an Ironic core reviewer and work on OnMetal at Rackspace. At Rackspace, we run ahead of Ironic trunk. It's true that we haven't been super vigilant about upstreaming our patches into Ironic; this is not because it's "secret sauce", not because we don't care. Priorities are hard, both upstream and downstream. OpenStack moves slowly compared to a team developing proprietary software. This is a well-known fact. We do our best to upstream our patches as quickly as the project allows, but they often need to be improved to work with other hardware/drivers/etc. For example, when we launched in July, we already had support for "cleaning" a server - erasing disks, flashing firmware, etc. The "spec" for the new feature was first posted upstream June 25, 2014.[0] This spec finally landed last January 16, 2015. Our work on improving network support in Ironic has been similar; the project hasn't been ready for it (again, priorities). It's been done in the open[1], but the code is not in Ironic trunk yet. We've been extremely open about what we're doing since we joined the Ironic project almost a year ago; I'm curious which patches the article has in mind. As an Ironic developer, this article bums me out a bit, but it's a good pointer as to what we're doing poorly. /me starts writing better docs [0] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/102685/ https://review.openstack.org/#/c/102685/ [1] https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/ironic-neutron-bonding https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/ironic-neutron-bonding

parasubvert 12y ago
This is excellent information, thanks for sharing it, and correcting my assumptions above.
dlaube 12y ago
I just wanted to chime in here to say that although there were several situations where our questions couldn't be answered, we probably wouldn't have made it as far with our testing if it wasn't for the answers that were received from the openstack ironic developers. I should also point out that I've always found the openstack ironic devs to be kind and professional. So be it as it may, it is unfortunate that there are some conflicting priorities but I certainly do not blame the devs.

xj9 12y ago

SmartDataCenter[1] was recently open sourced and is built on a lot of cool tech (ZFS, Dtrace, node.js, Illumos). [1]: https://github.com/joyent/sdc/ https://github.com/joyent/sdc/

parasubvert 12y ago
Good point, I have to remember that. I wish the world was more open to Illumos.

tjradcliffe 12y ago

> it's cloud vendor kabuki instead of distributed objects square dancing This is a beautiful and evocative metaphor.