
Secret History of OpenStack, the Free Cloud Software That’s Changing Everything - daegloe
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/04/openstack/
======
ebbv
A nice read and informative about the background of OpenStack, but doesn't
really give the reader any information about what state OpenStack is really in
and what trying to use it is like.

I work for a small to medium sized web hosting company and we looked into
using OpenStack as a solution for offering a Cloud product, and the problem is
that OpenStack is very much in a dough-like state. It's great if you want to
bake your own solution. But if what you need is bread to build a sandwich on,
you're going to be starting a lot further back in the proces than you maybe
want to.

I also fundamentally disagree with the whole direction of playing chase with
Amazon. Linux didn't supplant Windows by copying it; it supplanted Windows by
offering something that was better. If Linux had merely been free and Windows
compatible, I don't think it would be the success it is today. It was not just
free and open, but also technically superior.

I think OpenStack had -- and may still have -- an opportunity to provide a
much better platform than what Amazon has. EC2 has a lot of design flaws and
faults which result not from technical limitation but just bad design choices,
and there's no need for OpenStack to follow in them.

The biggest of them in my mind is the flavor issue. In the EC2/OpenStack
model, you cannot have customers spool up VMs with arbitrary specs; they must
choose from available flavors. So that means if you want to offer a wide
variety of options, you have to have many, many flavors on option. Which then
leads to the customer having to pick one of them -- or to obfuscate this issue
behind an interface which can match up the user's choices with the appropriate
flavor. Neither of which is a good solution.

There's no reason a cloud VM platform should have this kind of restriction.
Other competing platforms don't. I think OpenStack will eventually be
supplanted by something much better. It's just that this is a very new
industry, much more like competing computing platforms in the 1970's than the
much more mature battle that happened in the 1990's. Where even though Linux
was new, it was based on 25+ years of prior work and experience.

~~~
ridruejo
Linux did not supplant Windows by copying it, but it did supplant proprietary
Unix. Most (not all) really successful infrastructure open source projects
tend to be implementations of standards (MySQL/SQL, Apache/HTTP, Bind/DNS,
etc.) In this case the defacto standard is AWS and there is certainly a lot of
value in offering a compatible alternative. For me, the main issue is that
most people want to use a cloud, not run one. Obviously your case is different
because you are a web hosting company that want to compete with Amazon. My
take is that it is going to be incredibly difficult to match Amazon technology
and pricing and that existing web hosting companies will get consolidated and
disappear. Please note this is not what I wish and I am not arguing this would
be good for the ecosystem either, just that what it looks to me it is heading
to.

~~~
ebbv
A couple of things here, I'd say:

\- EC2/AWS may be the de facto standard but it's not an actual standard the
way SQL/HTTP/DNS are so I don't think the comparison is totally accurate. I
think there's plenty of room to supplant AWS by offering a better system.

\- There's plenty of room to compete with Amazon. Despite what you might think
their prices are actually pretty high with plenty of room for even small hosts
to undercut them. There's a reason that it's been so successful for Amazon;
they are making a mint on it.

The big problem for smaller hosts wanting to compete with Amazon is that
there's currently no ready made cloud solution that's 100% end user ready.
Every single solution on the market requires some amount of custom coding in
order to bring it up to end user quality. Which is frustrating.

~~~
ridruejo
A de facto standard is still a standard. Windows was the de facto standard in
desktop OS in the 90s and there was plenty of room for technical improvements.
But because it became standard and the network effects kicked in, there was
little incentive and a lot of cost for ISVs, system integrators, etc. to
support alternative platforms. The problem for smaller hosts is not that they
don't have a ready made cloud solution, it is that they are never, ever, going
to be able to match Amazon in terms of scale or efficiency. ISVs are going to
support the platform that allows them to reach more users, users are going to
choose the platform that has the apps/functionality they want. People are
going to need customized cloud solutions, but my take is that they will be
provided by third parties on top of Amazon, not as an alternative to it.

------
zmanji
“Whenever I would talk in Washington about this cloud technology enabling data
centers to run without people, this was interpreted as jobs going away,” Kemp
says. “There was a serious political challenge to the project…and I was called
before the NASA administrator — of the whole agency — to explain it.”

This is disturbing to say the least.

~~~
dpritchett
Anecdotal counterpoint: I worked much of my graduate assistantship in C.S. at
Shelby Hall, named for the senator cited in the article as leading the charge
against OpenStack.

[http://www.bama.ua.edu/~chem/facilities/buildings/shelby.htm...](http://www.bama.ua.edu/~chem/facilities/buildings/shelby.html)

~~~
rbarooah
How is that a counterpoint?

~~~
dpritchett
My graduate STEM education and paid job was partially funded by the guy. He's
not entirely out to stifle innovation.

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tybris
Interesting, but a big risk is that generic interfaces/software will limit
functionality and lead to suboptimal performance. Amazon can roll out a new
kind of hyper-advanced SSD-based database with some awkard custom interface
any day of the week because they control the hardware, software, and API. You
just cannot do that if your software runs in hundreds of different
environments you cannot control.

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bretpiatt
Well written piece, as accurate as anything that has been published to date.
The title is a bit sensationalist (though I suppose that is what gets readers)
-- none of this has been kept secret, it just hasn't been told on a stage the
size of Wired before.

~~~
sparkycollier
I do wish you'd gotten props, Bret, for your work in creating the openstack
case at Rackspace that we took to the board, and for your work in building the
ecosystem! We couldn't have done it without you, no doubt about it.

~~~
toomuchtodo
As an OpenStack user with several PB in production, thank you!

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SoftwareMaven
We recently moved our app from AWS to Rackspace because of OpenStack. If we
are successful, we know we want to run on our own hardware, but to get a sense
of the market is too expensive using dedicated hardware. Rackspace and
OpenStack gives us a way to test the waters using a cloud provider, then take
ownership of the whole ball of wax later, without massive disruption to the
software development effort.

~~~
ridruejo
You can do the same with Eucalyptus <http://www.eucalyptus.com>

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bostonvaulter2
Anyone have more info about these communal software houses? They sound pretty
interesting.

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jmitcheson
Can anyone comment on the main difference between this and Cloud Foundry?

