

Over Concerns About Openness, OpenStack Founder Leaves Rackspace - thankuz
http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/03/questions-about-openstack---is.php

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johnnygood
In Rackspace's defense, this might be more of an issue of lack of community.
Sometimes it's hard to get other people involved and excited about an open
source project. It's a lot easier for them to go to NASA, Dell, CloudKick and
others and get them to attach their name/logo to a participants page than to
get real participants. OpenStack isn't something most web people will be
interested in. It's infrastructure. Many, many companies need programmers and
tools for them. Very few companies out there are saying, "you know, I'd like
to build a server farm of 200 machines to give me a petabyte of distributed
object storage with replication policies, failover, the works". Most people
would rather just farm that out to S3 since, well, very few companies store
that much. Like, OpenStack's Object Storage is a lot of work if you're just
going to be storing 100GB. There's no way you could do it cheaper than the $15
S3 is going to charge for that storage since you'd need at least two machines.

How many of us could justify spending a lot of time on running our own object
store rather than using S3? It makes sense that Rackspace is a lot more
interested in it. I'd say that you'd need to be in the several terrabyte range
before it makes sense to think about it. Clearly sites like Facebook, Flickr,
and imgur want to run their own storage - they store a lot. But how many web
firms do? I'm not saying it isn't an awesome project and I was excited when it
came out. However, I'd have to be working on a site that stored a lot to
justify building my own cloud storage cluster.

For what it's worth, it would be awesome for everyone if this engineer went on
to create a Cloud Files and Cloud Storage competitor using Open Stack and
worked with Rackspace without any grudge. Sometimes that's how openness
happens. However, there tend to be fewer infrastructure vendors than web apps
and so an infrastructure project like this can't be expected to garner the
same attention as something like Apache or nginx which lots of people will be
running rather than mostly a few infrastructure vendors. For most web
operations, it doesn't make sense to pay a lot of money to build this
infrastructure when you can get it for cheaper from Amazon, Rackspace, and
others.

It might not be that Rackspace is being closed. It might just be that there
are few operations that want to help develop these tools and most of them
already have their own tools. Flickr and Facebook aren't going to drop their
storage engine for OpenStack. Amazon isn't going to replace S3's software with
OpenStack. SoftLayer does have their own cloud storage solution, but it isn't
as widely used so there's a possibility there, if not a large one.

It's great that it's open source and if Rackspace keeps up the development and
it's of high-quality it might start getting used by the next Facebook and
Flickr style companies that need that type of storage. But it will happen
slowly compared to the adoption of nginx, Django, MongoDB, etc.

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ChuckMcM
This is a common story, engineer on project X does his best to convince
management of X that they are making a mistake, they don't make the change,
engineer leaves.

The variables in this particular tale are

* Engineer's ability to influence varies by factors {in|out} of their control.

* Management {listens | doesn't listen} and {ignores | decides} not to act on the suggestions.

* Engineer { leaves | is fired | stays and whines } about the whole affair.

Its one of the rhythms of work. Everyone gets to keep a score in their head of
when they were right and when they were wrong. Its been said that if you're
right 51% of the time you're ahead of the game. Personally I prefer to be
right at least 61% of the time in ensure that being right isn't just a
statistical fluke :-).

But listening to people's concerns, asking for them to explain their
reasoning, and then acting based on reasoned debate rather than reputation,
personality, or prejudice is key to getting to the best answer at a given
time.

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susanbeebe
I wonder if they're a back story on this one...

