
The IT world’s love-hate relationship with OpenStack - iProject
http://gigaom.com/cloud/the-it-worlds-love-hate-relationship-with-openstack/
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ebbv
Having spent a lot of time with OpenStack, CloudStack and a number of other
cloud platforms (OnApp, Hexagrid and others) over the past two years I came to
a conclusion about OpenStack. It's like a bag of dough. Which is great if
you're trying to make bread. But if what you want to make is a sandwich, it's
not remotely there.

What I mean by that is, OpenStack seems very immature despite how much effort
has gone into it. It's still missing a lot of features that, if you're trying
to turn it into a commercial cloud platform, are necessary.

CloudStack, to me, seems more complete. I've been working with it for a couple
months now and have been very happy with it. It's what we'll be rolling out to
production hopefully later this year.

~~~
anon987
> It's still missing a lot of features that, if you're trying to turn it into
> a commercial cloud platform, are necessary.

Could you elaborate on this a bit?

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ebbv
One big issue is usage records. Last I checked OpenStack didn't have good API
calls for collecting usage data for users/VMs. It was one of those things that
was being worked on but wasn't really fully baked yet. CloudStack has a great
implementation already there and fully functional.

~~~
jerdfelt
I guess it depends on what perspective you're looking for. OpenStack sends
usage information to an AMQP queue for consumption. This is generally for use
by the provider and not the end-user however.

This is how the currently deployed public clouds collect usage data.

~~~
ebbv
Like I said, it doesn't provide nice simple API calls for collecting usage
information. You have to collect it yourself (from the queue, using PSHB or
something.) Then you have to then make your own interface for your billing
system to then request records it is interested in from this collection.

CloudStack providing simple API calls that allow you to request usage for any
time period is much nicer. It can interface more directly with a billing
system.

It's just one of the examples of OpenStack seeming to be kind of "halfway
there", whereas CloudStack is much closer to being ready to go.

~~~
jerdfelt
The queue of usage events is an API for collecting usage information, but it
sounds like it's not as high a layer as you'd like to see.

There is also the (new) Ceilometer project which sounds like it implements
what you're looking for:

<https://github.com/stackforge/ceilometer>

It is new, so it's probably not as mature as other options, but it has had a
lot of activity recently.

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nl
There is no doubt that the velocity Amazon ships features is a challenge to
both OpenStack and CloudStack.

OTOH, I've been very impressed with HP Cloud (which is OpenStack based). It's
true that it isn't yet feature-comparable with Amazon (if you use _all_ the
features of Amazon), but for most EC2/S3/CloudFront users then the HP Cloud
combination of Compute (Nova)/Storage (Swift)/CDN (Akamai) matches up well.

Following the dev list, and it is clear that OpenStack comes from Operations
rather than Software roots. For example, there is a lot of effort and
discussion around the command line tools, but the edge cases in the actual web
interfaces aren't well documented at all. (I"ve heard that CloudStack tends
the other way, but I don't follow that as closely).

I recently ran a survey[1] that showed that over 50% of users have resources
with more than one provider. To me that shows that there is room for things
like OpenStack.

[1] <http://fifthvertex.com/2012/08/07/cloud-tools-survey/>

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druiid
Having looked into and setup test implementations of Cloudstack, Openstack,
Opennebula and a few others... I have to say I was not that impressed with the
current state of Openstack.

For starters the documentation left much to be desired. An example of this was
the implementation of their XCP support. It exists, it's a thing in the
stack... but good luck implementing this based off of the documentation! They
fail to mention that it isn't really possible without an extreme amount of
hacking. In general the documentation leaves a lot to be desired in my
opinion, and for a project seeking as much influence on the cloud space as
Openstack is, this is a big miss.

Cloudstack has its own issues, but was a reasonably well documented project
with a clear implementation path. To note though, is that comparing their
XCP/Xenserver compatibility isn't fair since Citrix sponsors this project...

I think one of the problems with Openstack is it is trying to be too many
things when the core foundation of the software does not seem to be fully
'defined' yet.

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kbm1
What about someone like Joyent (www.joyent.com) vs OpenStack? They're more of
a software player but claim to have a cloud stack that operates more
efficiently than others.

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druiid
You're talking about smartOS I'm assuming? I'm not certain the comparison is
apt. With smartOS you're just being given a node platform, with Openstack you
have the entire management platform.

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ksec
Well i think he is referring to Smart DataCenter, which runs on Smart OS etc.

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kbm1
Yep Smart Data Center.

