8 ms·

Nebula is shutting down

85 points by jsmthrowaway 12y ago

mirashii 12y ago
The details on the shutdown are pretty spare. While the cloud market is perhaps still a bit immature, there are obviously many companies, both venture-backed and not, who are making plenty of money today. With a client list like they advertise, it makes me wonder how they couldn't trim down a bit to become revenue neutral at the very least, or trim their run rate down and raise another round to stick it out another few years. Something smells fishy.
- freehunter 12y ago
  Yep. https://www.nebula.com/customers/ https://www.nebula.com/customers/ Look at that huge list of big name clients. Either those clients were using Nebula for a very, very small operation or Nebula wasn't pricing their products accordingly. I mean, Lockheed alone should have been enough to have basically unlimited money. There's something else here that we haven't been told.
  - jldugger 12y ago
    I vaguely recall hearing that Nebula's OSCON party seemed to operate on an unlimited money budget, but I missed that year, and the subsequent year they were notoriously absent.
  - RyJones 12y ago
    It used to amuse me that training companies used one person taking one class once as enough excuse to advertise "Microsoft approved training!" Someone spending training budget on something does require approval, but there was (at the time) almost no oversight. I wonder if this is what's going on here.
  - stonith 12y ago
    They're probably mostly PoCs.
  - wilsynet 12y ago
    It's pretty common for companies to buy a small license just to experiment in the lab. At the end of the year you have some extra discretionary dollars, why not make a small purchase with startup that came by a few months ago?
- mirekrusin 12y ago
  It's not good for NSA if companies/people have private clouds.
j_baker 12y ago
April fools? It seems like an awfully poor way to do business for such a company to just go under without any advance notice. But then what are the company's customers going to do? Go somewhere else?
- freehunter 12y ago
  Well if it's just OpenStack, or if it's software built on top of OpenStack, it's fully possible to migrate to another OpenStack vendor. Then again, that supposes the product is open source.
  - count 12y ago
    That also pre-supposes that openstack implementations are interoperable.
  - moderation 12y ago
    Nebula was coupled with hardware that included a bundled Arista switch [1]. The hardware provided additional security features. (TPM etc.) So it might be hard to switch to another Openstack vendor from a stack so tightly bound to hardware. 1. http://www.theregister.co.uk/Print/2011/07/27/nebula_openstack_cloud_controller/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/Print/2011/07/27/nebula_opensta...
  - stonogo 12y ago
    https://twitter.com/bcantrill/status/552551004114534403 https://twitter.com/bcantrill/status/552551004114534403
- frostmatthew 12y ago
  > April fools? It's possible, but if it were I wouldn't expect them to tweet that it's true[1]. [1] https://twitter.com/NebulaInc/status/583388942294097920 https://twitter.com/NebulaInc/status/583388942294097920
- Sanddancer 12y ago
  April 1 is also the beginning of a new business quarter. Could very well be that they were looking at the quarterly finances, and decided not to continue running a sinking ship.
webdestroya 12y ago
Sounds like an April Fools joke...
hendzen 12y ago
I agree with Simon Wardley here [0] - OpenStack is a joke (from a business perspective) and all companies trying to build businesses on it will perish as Amazon builds a dominant monopoly. EDIT: Not companies that use OpenStack, companies that attempt to sell "enterprise clouds" based on OpenStack (like Nebula). [0] - https://twitter.com/swardley/status/499952875813224448 https://twitter.com/swardley/status/499952875813224448
- late2part 12y ago
  I don't know how to parse your comment. If you mean that companies using openstack as their core intellectual property, and providing add-ons and ancillary systems for it will perish, I think that may be so. If instead you suggest that any company using openstack in their business will perish, I think that's false. At the highest level, AWS lacks a private cloud on-site solution, for all but the CIA, AFAIK. Many companies can/will/are us[e|ing] openstack as part of their business to provide a private cloud. Arguably they'd be better off w/ native xen, lxc, docker, etc, but they seem to be making it work.
  - hendzen 12y ago
    The former interpretation is what I meant and I have updated my comment to reflect it.
  - count 12y ago
    The future AWS is driving towards is where they are the power generation company that nobody has onsite either (except for very rare circumstances). You might keep some temporary capacity / backups locally, but you'll depend on the utility to be there for the vast majority of things. The market will see if that's the future or not...
    - ghaff 12y ago
      That's the "Big Switch" theory. It's one possible future although my sense is that there's considerable skepticism about it from both the perspective of where the economical scale points sit and with respect to governance/control.
jprince 12y ago
This is a pretty poor April Fools.
tuan5 12y ago
April 1st
colmvp 12y ago
I know this is a vapid comment but the video on their website showcasing the Nebula Cloud Controller is slick.
- lloydde 12y ago
  They did make great videos! The voice of Patrick Stewart at the start of the Nebula One launch video still gives me shivers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4rsEjsomFI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4rsEjsomFI And don't forget back in 2011 with the launch of the company at OSCON with the who's who intro video before the presentation including hardware pr0n https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oydzMfFYWM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oydzMfFYWM I also couldn't help, but think that http://opennebula.org/ http://opennebula.org/ will be happy for the end of the namespace collision. Hubris videos aside, Nebula.com carried more than their share of the weight in the first 3 years of OpenStack, and made me believe that OpenCompute wasn't just Facebook. Thank you and best wishes to all who brought NASA Nebula to open source and made OpenStack a reality!
  - imikushin 12y ago
    "including hardware pr0n" ))) NSFW (sound wise)
  - bshimmin 12y ago
    I have no idea what paying for Patrick Stewart to do a voiceover costs, but I can't help but feel it may have been a contributory factor in their demise. (Not, perhaps, directly, but it may be indicative of the sort of mentality that suggests frugality isn't a high priority...)
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
mrbill 12y ago
My last employer wanted to look at OpenStack as a drop-in cheaper replacement for VMWare vSphere - and unfortunately, it wasn't that simple.
partisan 12y ago
Can I have the domain name?
- simonswords82 12y ago
  I reckon the domain name will be one of the many assets sold off to recover any losses as a result of the shut down. But having said that, if you don't ask you don't get!
ausjke 12y ago
April Fool? Please don't do this sort of public announcement on Apr,1. I worked on Openstack for about a year and moved on something else, it was not quite ready then, maybe still not there yet?
GatesBills 12y ago
I met Chris Kemp two years ago along with my ACIO at a midwest compute conference. We explained that between Piston and Nebula we chose Piston. When Chris asked why, I explained that it was due to price. He replied "You mean to tell me the only reason you didn't buy my product, is because of the price?!?!" To which I replied "That's the only reason I don't drive a Lambo." Even with a heavy discount, Nebula was too expensive. With that being said, I am equally worried about Piston's future. With the two OpenStack creators moving on from their first OpenStack entrepreneurial efforts, it definitely indicates a new phase of this OpenStack thing.
gtirloni 12y ago
I'm really disappointed they decided to shutdown everything so suddenly with no plans to keep support going for at least another 3 months. What kind of management team gets a company to a point they have to shut it down in a single day and tell everybody to pack and go home? For posterity (and to avoid entering similar risky situation in the future), here is their management team: - Gordon Stitt (@gordonstitt) - Chris C. Kemp (@kemp) - Devin Carlen (@devcamcar) - Vish Ishaya (@vish) - Herb Schneider - Huy Nguyen And additional board members (mostly VC supervisors): - Peter Bell - Mark Leslie - Ted Schlein - Louis Toth

85 points by jsmthrowaway 12y ago

The details on the shutdown are pretty spare. While the cloud market is perhaps still a bit immature, there are obviously many companies, both venture-backed and not, who are making plenty of money today. With a client list like they advertise, it makes me wonder how they couldn't trim down a bit to become revenue neutral at the very least, or trim their run rate down and raise another round to stick it out another few years. Something smells fishy.

freehunter 12y ago
Yep. https://www.nebula.com/customers/ https://www.nebula.com/customers/ Look at that huge list of big name clients. Either those clients were using Nebula for a very, very small operation or Nebula wasn't pricing their products accordingly. I mean, Lockheed alone should have been enough to have basically unlimited money. There's something else here that we haven't been told.
- jldugger 12y ago
  I vaguely recall hearing that Nebula's OSCON party seemed to operate on an unlimited money budget, but I missed that year, and the subsequent year they were notoriously absent.
- RyJones 12y ago
  It used to amuse me that training companies used one person taking one class once as enough excuse to advertise "Microsoft approved training!" Someone spending training budget on something does require approval, but there was (at the time) almost no oversight. I wonder if this is what's going on here.
- stonith 12y ago
  They're probably mostly PoCs.
- wilsynet 12y ago
  It's pretty common for companies to buy a small license just to experiment in the lab. At the end of the year you have some extra discretionary dollars, why not make a small purchase with startup that came by a few months ago?
mirekrusin 12y ago
It's not good for NSA if companies/people have private clouds.

j_baker 12y ago

April fools? It seems like an awfully poor way to do business for such a company to just go under without any advance notice. But then what are the company's customers going to do? Go somewhere else?

freehunter 12y ago
Well if it's just OpenStack, or if it's software built on top of OpenStack, it's fully possible to migrate to another OpenStack vendor. Then again, that supposes the product is open source.
- count 12y ago
  That also pre-supposes that openstack implementations are interoperable.
- moderation 12y ago
  Nebula was coupled with hardware that included a bundled Arista switch [1]. The hardware provided additional security features. (TPM etc.) So it might be hard to switch to another Openstack vendor from a stack so tightly bound to hardware. 1. http://www.theregister.co.uk/Print/2011/07/27/nebula_openstack_cloud_controller/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/Print/2011/07/27/nebula_opensta...
- stonogo 12y ago
  https://twitter.com/bcantrill/status/552551004114534403 https://twitter.com/bcantrill/status/552551004114534403
frostmatthew 12y ago
> April fools? It's possible, but if it were I wouldn't expect them to tweet that it's true[1]. [1] https://twitter.com/NebulaInc/status/583388942294097920 https://twitter.com/NebulaInc/status/583388942294097920
Sanddancer 12y ago
April 1 is also the beginning of a new business quarter. Could very well be that they were looking at the quarterly finances, and decided not to continue running a sinking ship.

webdestroya 12y ago

Sounds like an April Fools joke...

hendzen 12y ago

I agree with Simon Wardley here [0] - OpenStack is a joke (from a business perspective) and all companies trying to build businesses on it will perish as Amazon builds a dominant monopoly. EDIT: Not companies that use OpenStack, companies that attempt to sell "enterprise clouds" based on OpenStack (like Nebula). [0] - https://twitter.com/swardley/status/499952875813224448 https://twitter.com/swardley/status/499952875813224448

late2part 12y ago
I don't know how to parse your comment. If you mean that companies using openstack as their core intellectual property, and providing add-ons and ancillary systems for it will perish, I think that may be so. If instead you suggest that any company using openstack in their business will perish, I think that's false. At the highest level, AWS lacks a private cloud on-site solution, for all but the CIA, AFAIK. Many companies can/will/are us[e|ing] openstack as part of their business to provide a private cloud. Arguably they'd be better off w/ native xen, lxc, docker, etc, but they seem to be making it work.
- hendzen 12y ago
  The former interpretation is what I meant and I have updated my comment to reflect it.
- count 12y ago
  The future AWS is driving towards is where they are the power generation company that nobody has onsite either (except for very rare circumstances). You might keep some temporary capacity / backups locally, but you'll depend on the utility to be there for the vast majority of things. The market will see if that's the future or not...
  - ghaff 12y ago
    That's the "Big Switch" theory. It's one possible future although my sense is that there's considerable skepticism about it from both the perspective of where the economical scale points sit and with respect to governance/control.

jprince 12y ago

This is a pretty poor April Fools.

tuan5 12y ago

April 1st

colmvp 12y ago

I know this is a vapid comment but the video on their website showcasing the Nebula Cloud Controller is slick.

lloydde 12y ago
They did make great videos! The voice of Patrick Stewart at the start of the Nebula One launch video still gives me shivers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4rsEjsomFI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4rsEjsomFI And don't forget back in 2011 with the launch of the company at OSCON with the who's who intro video before the presentation including hardware pr0n https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oydzMfFYWM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oydzMfFYWM I also couldn't help, but think that http://opennebula.org/ http://opennebula.org/ will be happy for the end of the namespace collision. Hubris videos aside, Nebula.com carried more than their share of the weight in the first 3 years of OpenStack, and made me believe that OpenCompute wasn't just Facebook. Thank you and best wishes to all who brought NASA Nebula to open source and made OpenStack a reality!
- imikushin 12y ago
  "including hardware pr0n" ))) NSFW (sound wise)
- bshimmin 12y ago
  I have no idea what paying for Patrick Stewart to do a voiceover costs, but I can't help but feel it may have been a contributory factor in their demise. (Not, perhaps, directly, but it may be indicative of the sort of mentality that suggests frugality isn't a high priority...)

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

mrbill 12y ago

My last employer wanted to look at OpenStack as a drop-in cheaper replacement for VMWare vSphere - and unfortunately, it wasn't that simple.

partisan 12y ago

Can I have the domain name?

simonswords82 12y ago
I reckon the domain name will be one of the many assets sold off to recover any losses as a result of the shut down. But having said that, if you don't ask you don't get!

ausjke 12y ago

April Fool? Please don't do this sort of public announcement on Apr,1. I worked on Openstack for about a year and moved on something else, it was not quite ready then, maybe still not there yet?

GatesBills 12y ago

I met Chris Kemp two years ago along with my ACIO at a midwest compute conference. We explained that between Piston and Nebula we chose Piston. When Chris asked why, I explained that it was due to price. He replied "You mean to tell me the only reason you didn't buy my product, is because of the price?!?!" To which I replied "That's the only reason I don't drive a Lambo." Even with a heavy discount, Nebula was too expensive. With that being said, I am equally worried about Piston's future. With the two OpenStack creators moving on from their first OpenStack entrepreneurial efforts, it definitely indicates a new phase of this OpenStack thing.

gtirloni 12y ago

I'm really disappointed they decided to shutdown everything so suddenly with no plans to keep support going for at least another 3 months. What kind of management team gets a company to a point they have to shut it down in a single day and tell everybody to pack and go home? For posterity (and to avoid entering similar risky situation in the future), here is their management team: - Gordon Stitt (@gordonstitt) - Chris C. Kemp (@kemp) - Devin Carlen (@devcamcar) - Vish Ishaya (@vish) - Herb Schneider - Huy Nguyen And additional board members (mostly VC supervisors): - Peter Bell - Mark Leslie - Ted Schlein - Louis Toth