
Infrastructure Software is Dead - ctdean
https://www.mirantis.com/blog/infrastructure-software-is-dead/
======
ewams
It is really funny, I agree with this 100% but also think because of the new
norm of instant gratification this person is totally wrong. I have customers
that all the time state they want to move to an openstack platform but have no
programmers or unwilling to hire programmers. So of course we go down that
path, look at the capex and opex and their brains explode. Then we look at
aws/azure/vCloud and regular internal cloud with its associated costs and they
come back from their heart attacks.

If you are a services company, he is right, you should be focusing on
outcomes. But, if you can't tell me in 2-3 sentences what problem you are
solving and how it benefits the customer you are doing it wrong.

This is a world of businesses and businesses need to make money, usually.
Everyone gets so caught up on the new hot thing or the new "revolution" or
what the competition is doing without thinking of what problem they are trying
to solve or what actual value they are providing. This article says they
provide outcomes, sure I can provide outcomes by moving you to SAP, or VDI, or
hyperconverged, but what problem is this solving?

Don't tell me it "cut costs", it rarely does and lots of people smarter than
me have shown that cutting costs are not the top priority of most leadership.

Back to the point of the article. I have made a lot of money in consulting. I
now sell consulting services. You know how I do it? "Yes Mr customer how are
you? Cool great, I am fine thanks. So what problems does your organization
have, what are your goals, and how can I help you?"

Boom. You are all welcome.

Don't talk about product or you will lose to me or someone better. Don't talk
money or you lose. Don't talk fads or you lose. Talk about the business and
how you will help it reach its goals, overcomes it's problems, and grow!

~~~
StillBored
This! I previously worked for a small software company that frequently got
itself lost in the upgrade treadmill (its going to take N man months to
upgrade underlying technology X/Y/Z to the latest versions). Yet in the end, I
kept asking, what does technology X/Y/Z provide to the product that benefits
the customer. Those questions frequently didn't have satisfying answers.

So, your not the cool, forward looking engineer when you favor using a 5 year
old toolchain to build your product. OTOH, your also the engineer that doesn't
have to come in on weekends to debug the death march bug that ends up being a
result of doing the upgrade.

~~~
draw_down
Sure. But, have fun trying to get a new job when you're using 5 year old tech.
In other words it's not just about pride or being one of the cool kids.

~~~
icebraining
You must be a frontend or mobile developer. On the server side using five year
old tech is the mark of a proactive and daring company. Our code depends on
Python 2.7 (released in 2010) and we still have to compile our own CPython
every time we deploy on servers managed by the client.

~~~
cthalupa
This is less and less true in the new and excited cloud/devops world, for
better or worse. There are plenty of companies that even on the server side
are chasing the latest release cycle.

------
ams6110
_Everybody’s OpenStack software is equally bad. It’s also as bad as all the
other infrastructure software out there – software-defined networking,
software-defined storage, cloud management platforms, platforms-as-service,
container orchestrators, you name it. It’s all full of bugs, hard to upgrade
and a nightmare to operate. It’s all bad._

100% my experience with OpenStack. And the breaking releases every 6 months
only add insult to injury.

~~~
jclulow
Right. This part of the article was the most aggrevating for me.

Perhaps the author could refrain from speaking for everybody! OpenStack may be
a ruinous rubbish barge of a platform, but others are working on software that
seeks to _reduce_ operational complexity. Software that does not exist merely
to propel yet another band of consultants into a defeatist, over-priced
nightmare cathedral of apparently irreducible complexity and unmitigated
unreliability.

Outcomes for customers are extremely important, but it does not follow that
software quality is immaterial, or unachievable, or that OpenStack is just as
good a choice as anything else -- even if it does come with a consulting
racket.

~~~
tobias3
One could argue that because all the money is made by consulting, managing
upgrades etc. the harder it is to setup, operate and to upgrade the better for
the players in the OpenStack space.

If the underlying incentives don't coincide with good software you get crappy
software.

------
mattbee
As MD of a medium-sized UK-based cloud server company (Bytemark, cough), I'm
_so_ glad to hear someone else saying this. We made the decision in 2010 to
design and build our own cloud services stack - from scratch, ultimately
including a low-level storage layer. This was just after Openstack was
announced, so it felt like a risk not to get on this particular wagon.

We opened our service to customers within a year, and fixed what felt like
small silly bugs while constantly racing to keep the platform up. Openstack
kept getting richer and puffier and more important-sounding. Even though we
thought we would eventually "make the switch" I couldn't for the life of me
find any success stories, and looking at the software it seemed to have some
crucial gaps that we'd need to fill, and a bunch of layers that we didn't need
or care about for our simple "cloud servers" offering.

We're at the point where mayyyyybe we could think about switching out one or
two components, but my gut feeling is that 1) these are quite simple
components for us where our maintenance burden is manageable, 2) our model of
VMs is slightly different (more permanent) than Openstack's and, of course 3)
the integration effort doesn't seem worth it, and the loss of experience
compared to our own software seems a huge risk if it puts the stability of our
platform at risk. So it still feels like picking a fight with our own stable
software for benefit that was way down the line.

We're in exactly the same spot at Boris - our customers care about the
service, not the software. There is just so much integration with our own
hardware, network, data centre & customer services operation that's outside
the scope of Openstack that it never quite seemed relevant.

------
jpgvm
More provocative over insightful.

Infrastructure software isn't dead - but Openstack is.

It may still be used, and may continue to see a bit of media now and then but
really it's gone the way of Puppet/Cfengine/<many proprietry infra software
here>.

It missed it's chance to be good by allowing itself to be corrupted a massive
design by committee disaster. Openstack needed a cohesive vision if it was to
stand a chance against the integrated enterprise stacks or the custom in-house
ones it sought to supplant. It never had it and at this point it never will.

I don't mean any ill-will to any of the Mirantis boys or the other countless
hackers that worked on Openstack circa Cinder/Neutron introduction. I was
there too, we tried to right the ship before it got too far off-course and we
failed. Many smart people tried to make Openstack good but it was out of the
hands of the hackers.

~~~
AndyNemmity
and I have the complete opposite view. Openstack is killing it even though
it's as crappy as everything else in many ways. It's without cost, it's
automatable, you don't build inhouse software to handle it, and you build
applications that can withstand software and hardware failures.

Openstack isn't a replacement for configuration management.

The massive design by committee is fantastic, because you can help change and
adapt where openstack goes. You don't have that option with insert vendor.

We just disagree completely

~~~
djsumdog
I've worked for two companies that hemorrhaged money trying to set up
functional open stack environments. I was on an openstack security team for
one company. Omg...yea I'm not going three. I don't feel like raging before
bed.

~~~
AndyNemmity
I work for a company that is doing fine setting up functional openstack
environments. It depends on how much you're willing to spend on it.

We've put enough resources to make it happen, and it's working out fine.

------
devonkim
I've been consulting for public sector and the companies in the Fortune 500
that are behind the software and operations curve from even start-up companies
and always will by choice + self-imposed bureaucracy. The problem I've
observed consistently across various custom cloud and openstack
implementations is that none of the products and technologies that people are
developing are able to succeed because everyone assumes that they "solved"
basic infrastructure management a decade ago when their operations teams are
woefully unskilled, unmotivated, and unable to meet the demands of today's
environments. Most organizations do not have monitoring beyond what comes out
of the box even for production environments, most places do not have defined
SLAs, almost nobody tests backups or their DR runbooks even though they spent
$2M+ on a DR implementation. None of this is the fault of the engineers
though; their managers wanted silos and people that just go implement their
promotion-garnering plans that all go south.

~~~
HannibalLecter
I wish you were wrong. Silos are everywhere -- ugly and unavoidable
bottlenecks. Nobody has a plan to fix that culture though because it works
only just good enough.

~~~
devonkim
I personally don't see anything "wrong" with silos - they are the partitions
of the distributed systems of human society and are going to emerge anyway
partially due to Dunbar's number in a "flat" organization. The issue I see is
that managers are unwilling or very slow to understand new lines of division
of labor ("What do you mean that sysadmins should also be developers? Why
would we want that?" \- direct quote from a customer) because it doesn't
correspond to what their information systems management textbooks from 2002
told them how IT labor is divided. Then comes issues of training managers and
telling people why this re-org is _so_ much better than the last 10. This is
why the "devops" movement in enterprise is cheap business consulting labor to
me - it results in a re-org in most places, and that's the equivalent of
developers showing up at a new shop and suggesting refactors as a newbie.

Furthermore, most IT managers have such poor data from the organizations they
run that the only things they can track are money spent, not money saved and
such. And showing that a CIO doesn't know wtf his company gets you kicked out
of meetings permanently in most (typically dysfunctional) organizational
cultures.

------
jondubois
Distributed orchestration software is only just starting to become usable. See
[http://rancher.com/..](http://rancher.com/..). I wouldn't call infrastructure
software dead. It's the beginning.

I think the problem is that most existing tools/engines/components which make
up software systems (e.g. databases, memory stores, frameworks, etc...) were
designed to run on a single machine and so far, it's been the DevOps'
responsibility to scale them manually. Even for those components which DO
support clustering; their approach is often not compatible with most
orchestration systems (they tend to micromanage the cluster - Instead of
micromanaging the cluster and thereby fighting the orchestrator, the focus
should be on writing simple hooks for the orchestrator to invoke).

Developers of tools/engines/components need to change their mindset and start
building engines from the ground up to run on distributed orchestration
software like Kubernetes, Swarm or Mesos and automatic scalability has to be
BUILT INTO every component/service.

A major problem is that there seems to be a massive skill divide between
DevOps/SysAdmins and Software Developers - Software devs think of systems like
Kubernetes and Swarm as being the responsibility of DevOps people and don't
spend enough time thinking about how it impacts them. This is the wrong
attitude - The two skillsets need to converge in order to build effective
solutions.

Orchestration management tools are the new operating systems - In the same way
that one can build apps/systems which are compatible with Linux, Windows or
OSX, we should build apps/systems which are compatible with Kubernetes, Swarm
or Mesos.

There is more to these orchestration tools than just writing up config files -
The code within the components themselves have to be designed to play nice
with the automatic scheduling/orchestration requirements.

~~~
danielbln
Agreed on all points. Rancher looks quite good and I'm looking forward to
something that will soothe the pain in my ass that is the micromanagement of
postgres clusters.

------
dkarapetyan
Well everyone is making money except docker. Drives the point home I think.
Docker's business is docker and you can't really make money with it whereas
everyone else is building a business on top of docker to deliver outcomes to
customers.

------
Ericson2314
Heh, it's like
[http://dtrace.org/blogs/wesolows/2014/12/29/fin/](http://dtrace.org/blogs/wesolows/2014/12/29/fin/)
but from a different angle.

I personal, naive as it sounds, beleive nix* (as in e.g. NixOS) could be a
silver bullet here, but the market is so used to IT being inherently shitty I
don't believe it will happen.

~~~
nickpsecurity
Thanks for the link. I didn't know Cantrill basically imploded. His gripes on
Pike's comment and industry mimicked my own. He's way overstating how much
people ignore the system level as there's active projects handling it funded
by NSF, DARPA, and EU with a practical focus. Most practical being ones with
defense contractors (esp Galois) or actual engineers partnered in. Quite a few
going from software to firmware to hardware with some to the gates. He could
possibly enjoy himself and do some good getting hooked into one of those
groups to cover pragmatic, real-world aspects plus spot opportunities as
development goes on.

"beleive nix* (as in e.g. NixOS) could be a silver bullet here"

Come on, now. Try to avoid that trap. You need to look at what the market
needs in compatibility/legacy, production worthiness, talent to aid
deployment/support, security, and so on. Always consider these plus target
markets when evaluating any software platform. NixOS at first glance appears
to fall short in quite a few.

Now, what I do like about NixOS is its declarative, transaction-oriented
packaging. That's great if implemented well given my Linux distro's screw that
stuff up to this day when I install an odd package with one incompatibility in
it. Irreparably breaks system or appears to. (rolls eyes) Source-based is
debatable but allows site-specific optimizations. I'm barely in the debate but
lean against systemd, which Cantrill's post mentions incidentally, as it's too
complex to be in critical position it inhabits. Critics pointed out a simple
thing in its spot plus less privileged services doing management or whatever.
Consistent with best practices from high-integrity & high-security engineering
going back decades. So, I see it as a weakness albeit a small one in larger
picture.

So, there's my two cents on that link and claim.

~~~
intherdfield
> Thanks for the link. I didn't know Cantrill basically imploded.

That wasn't written by bcantrill. He hasn't imploded yet, as far as we all
know. Unless that was when Oracle bought Sun and he's been operating in the
imploded state since.

~~~
nickpsecurity
Oops. Part of the page didn't render on the device I was using. Couldn't see
the name. Thought it was him with the illumos and joylent references. Thanks
for the correction!

Note: So someone else that worked there was imploding and could use some time
at aforementioned projects clean-slating or improving HW/SW architectures. :)

~~~
Ericson2314
Yeah this is somebody else doing Fishworks->Oracle->Joyent. Original HN thread
on the blog post btw
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8816055](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8816055).

~~~
nickpsecurity
Ahhhh. Ok, all clear now. Thanks to both of you.

------
greenspot
'Infrastructure software' is a too general simplication. If you break down
infrastructure software the OP would find many types of software in this field
which aren't dead.

~~~
int0x80
This.

First of all, he should define what "infrastructure software" he is refering
to.

He mostly talks about OpenStack, AWS ... "services".

But it is obviously not only that. It is low level libraries (C lib),
compilers, interpreters, operating systems, graphic engines, virtualization
software, etc. This kind of software runs on allmost all deployments out
there. It is far from dead.

------
unethical_ban
IaaS vendor says that companies don't want to host their own infrastructure,
more at 11.

I tried to get a neutral take on this, but it reads far too much like a sales
pitch, even for vendor blog levels.

------
bogomipz
"And the reason Mirantis has been successful is because, despite ourselves,
outcomes are what we’ve been able to deliver to our customers by complementing
crappy OpenStack software with hordes of talented infrastructure hackers that
made up for the gaps.

This is't really a ringing endorsement of your business is it? It's nice that
he acknowledges a talented team but to refer to your core product as "crappy"
is more than a little depressing in my opinion.

~~~
praneshp
His product = "crappy openstack" \+ developers. He is just calling openstack
(which is made by the community, not just Mirantis) crappy.

~~~
bogomipz
Yes thats the point I was making, it's an odd business practice to publicly
state that fundamentally your business product is crap.

------
dunkelheit
He is basically saying "don't ever count on openstack becoming non-crappy, we
have a vested interest in keeping it crappy so that to get anything done you
will still need to pay mirantis to deploy 'hordes of talented infrastructure
hackers". Well, thanks for honesty.

------
vog
_> But none of this matters, because today customers don’t care about
software. Customers care about outcomes._

Why "today"? Hasn't this always been the case? It sounds essentially like a
rephrasing of Paul Graham's advice: "Make something people want."

------
chris_wot
Only slightly facetious, but if they are trying to decouple containers from
one another then perhaps they should consider a basic Inversion of Control
design principle.

Perhaps that's the job of the orchestrator already though.

------
yyyuuu
Forgive my ignorance but what exactly is infrastructure software?

------
lifeisstillgood
I presume because people still need to run "private cloud" \- because of
regulation, national borders or not quite trusting AWS with your heart mind
and ballsack.

------
bogomipz
Is infrastructure software dead though, or is just Openstack dead?

My perception is Mesos is really impressive and picking up a lot of traction.

------
digi_owl
All this chatter about Openstack and how it fails brings to mind stories of
SAP, and the ways it can turn into a money sink.

------
vitoc
Well, service, yes. Additionally, freedom from service dependence too.

------
mmaunder
"Who's with me?" ~Jerry Maguire.

------
simbalion
Maybe commercial software is dead.

We all want it, except for some youngins.. how long can the corporate
marketplace defy the will of the people who fuel the market?

Free software is the future. The benefits to mankind are too great.

~~~
morgante
> how long can the corporate marketplace defy the will of the people who fuel
> the market?

How can you claim that it's the will of all developers to be unemployed?

~~~
icebraining
Still this nonsense? Lots of people make a living writing FOSS, and that's
with the competition of non-FOSS companies.

As long as there's a demand for more software, there will be jobs for all the
developers needed to write it.

