

Nebula is shutting down - jsmthrowaway
https://www.nebula.com/

======
GatesBills
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.

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mirashii
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
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.

~~~
RyJones
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.

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gtirloni
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

------
j_baker
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
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.

~~~
stonogo
[https://twitter.com/bcantrill/status/552551004114534403](https://twitter.com/bcantrill/status/552551004114534403)

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

~~~
lloydde
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!

~~~
bshimmin
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...)

------
partisan
Can I have the domain name?

~~~
simonswords82
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
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?

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

------
tuan5
April 1st

------
jprince
This is a pretty poor April Fools.

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webdestroya
Sounds like an April Fools joke...

------
hendzen
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
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.

~~~
count
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...

~~~
jasonlotito
> The future AWS is driving towards is where they are the power generation
> company that nobody has onsite eithe

Don't you mean "a power generation company." I take it you live some place
that does not give you choice.

~~~
count
You don't chose who provides the electrons coming over your poles in the VAST
Majority of locations (some folks run substations to multiple grids, but even
then, are talking to the whole other grid, not a single power company).

Deregulated power is about where you send your bill, not who's producing the
electrons.

