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As someone who's only been on the outside of OpenStack's community, but interested and learning about it a little here and there, could someone give a brief ove

As someone who's only been on the outside of OpenStack's community, but interested and learning about it a little here and there, could someone give a brief overview of major players and why it seems a number of individuals involved in the OpenStack community have burned out? Is it really as bad as this post suggests? Many technologies become heavily burdened by too much (non-development) investment and companies doing a land grab on a hot new product; is that the case here?

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
yeukhon 11y ago
Redhat, IBM, Rackspace, HP are pretty major players (and there are users like HP, Bloomberg & IBM research). You can find them https://www.openstack.org/foundation/ https://www.openstack.org/foundation/. While I don't have any first hand experience contributing to OpenStack (but complained quite a lot back in the old days as user), most of the developers are paid. Obviously OpenStack started out with NASA and (then) Rackspace, so it totally makes sense folks there held the manager/committer/BDFL titles and drove the decisions. I do agree many of the APIs are awkaward and the Python code is not very Pythonic (classic example: why are attributes with "-" exist?? as user I have to use getattr(object, "OS-XXXX") to retrieve the value). Oh my god.
- harlowja 11y ago
  I hope https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/API_Working_Group https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/API_Working_Group (which I'm pretty sure is active @ https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Meetings/API-WG https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Meetings/API-WG) will make this better in the future. As always feel free to show up :)
- pmontra 11y ago
  I'm not familiar with both OpenStack and Python so I might be totally missing the point but JavaScript has a similar problem with DOM attributes and CSS rules. It accesses them either as strings or as camel cased object properties. Example with jQuery el.css({"background-color": "red"}) el.css({backgroundColor: "red"}) Can Python do the same?
harlowja 11y ago
>> Is it really as bad as this post suggests? That's very hard to quantify, one of the projects (really a library) I work on I'm pretty proud of and I think it's actually somewhat innovative: http://docs.openstack.org/developer/taskflow/ http://docs.openstack.org/developer/taskflow/ (obviously I'm biased).
kordless 11y ago
Observation: The OpenStack board is controlled by board seats which are mostly held by people employed with large publicly traded companies. At one point I calculated these companies to have a combined market cap of ~US$1/2 trillion. Blaming Statement: Make no mistake, the companies who control OpenStack are "in it to win it". That's probably not good for innovation or optimization. Reality: Everything above is a moot point because Docker. Or more specifically, everything above is a moot point because LXC containers. Containers are a better solution layer for developers than instances. Instances are still a good solution layer for providers, but those guys are few and far between, and their margins are thin. No clue what that means for OpenStack, but it can't be good. Disclaimer: I've helped ~25K people install OpenStack with my scripts. I'm biased and am spending most of my time now with containerization technologies.
- harlowja 11y ago
  >> All of that is a moot point now because Docker. What made you think OpenStack wasn't into containers? :) - https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Magnum https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Magnum - https://www.openstack.org/blog/2015/07/google-bringing-container-expertise-to-openstack/ https://www.openstack.org/blog/2015/07/google-bringing-conta... - http://adrianotto.com/2015/01/announcing-magnum-caas-for-openstack/ http://adrianotto.com/2015/01/announcing-magnum-caas-for-ope... I know it's a common misconception but OpenStack is not just virtual machines. It's a stack and many projects with various names do various things, from compute APIs [nova], volume storage [cinder], networking [neutron] to baremetal [ironic] to orchestration [heat] to ...
- jacques_chester 11y ago
  > Everything above is a moot point because Docker. OpenStack does more than containerise. Docker Inc. are racing up the stack to catch juicy value, but so is everyone else. Red Hat, Pivotal[0] and IBM are already at the top of the stack with OpenShift and Cloud Foundry, so it's getting crowded. But in the middle there's an awful lot of mechanism required to run an IaaS and OpenStack is the only serious opensource contender around. [0] disclaimer: I work in Pivotal Labs.
  - 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

yeukhon 11y ago

Redhat, IBM, Rackspace, HP are pretty major players (and there are users like HP, Bloomberg & IBM research). You can find them https://www.openstack.org/foundation/ https://www.openstack.org/foundation/. While I don't have any first hand experience contributing to OpenStack (but complained quite a lot back in the old days as user), most of the developers are paid. Obviously OpenStack started out with NASA and (then) Rackspace, so it totally makes sense folks there held the manager/committer/BDFL titles and drove the decisions. I do agree many of the APIs are awkaward and the Python code is not very Pythonic (classic example: why are attributes with "-" exist?? as user I have to use getattr(object, "OS-XXXX") to retrieve the value). Oh my god.

harlowja 11y ago
I hope https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/API_Working_Group https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/API_Working_Group (which I'm pretty sure is active @ https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Meetings/API-WG https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Meetings/API-WG) will make this better in the future. As always feel free to show up :)
pmontra 11y ago
I'm not familiar with both OpenStack and Python so I might be totally missing the point but JavaScript has a similar problem with DOM attributes and CSS rules. It accesses them either as strings or as camel cased object properties. Example with jQuery el.css({"background-color": "red"}) el.css({backgroundColor: "red"}) Can Python do the same?

harlowja 11y ago

>> Is it really as bad as this post suggests? That's very hard to quantify, one of the projects (really a library) I work on I'm pretty proud of and I think it's actually somewhat innovative: http://docs.openstack.org/developer/taskflow/ http://docs.openstack.org/developer/taskflow/ (obviously I'm biased).

kordless 11y ago

Observation: The OpenStack board is controlled by board seats which are mostly held by people employed with large publicly traded companies. At one point I calculated these companies to have a combined market cap of ~US$1/2 trillion. Blaming Statement: Make no mistake, the companies who control OpenStack are "in it to win it". That's probably not good for innovation or optimization. Reality: Everything above is a moot point because Docker. Or more specifically, everything above is a moot point because LXC containers. Containers are a better solution layer for developers than instances. Instances are still a good solution layer for providers, but those guys are few and far between, and their margins are thin. No clue what that means for OpenStack, but it can't be good. Disclaimer: I've helped ~25K people install OpenStack with my scripts. I'm biased and am spending most of my time now with containerization technologies.

harlowja 11y ago
>> All of that is a moot point now because Docker. What made you think OpenStack wasn't into containers? :) - https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Magnum https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Magnum - https://www.openstack.org/blog/2015/07/google-bringing-container-expertise-to-openstack/ https://www.openstack.org/blog/2015/07/google-bringing-conta... - http://adrianotto.com/2015/01/announcing-magnum-caas-for-openstack/ http://adrianotto.com/2015/01/announcing-magnum-caas-for-ope... I know it's a common misconception but OpenStack is not just virtual machines. It's a stack and many projects with various names do various things, from compute APIs [nova], volume storage [cinder], networking [neutron] to baremetal [ironic] to orchestration [heat] to ...
jacques_chester 11y ago
> Everything above is a moot point because Docker. OpenStack does more than containerise. Docker Inc. are racing up the stack to catch juicy value, but so is everyone else. Red Hat, Pivotal[0] and IBM are already at the top of the stack with OpenShift and Cloud Foundry, so it's getting crowded. But in the middle there's an awful lot of mechanism required to run an IaaS and OpenStack is the only serious opensource contender around. [0] disclaimer: I work in Pivotal Labs.
- 11y ago