back to article OpenStack says its work is largely done. Now your hard work can fill in the blanks

The OpenStack Foundation has kicked off its summit in Sydney, Australia, with a call to current OpenStack users to help it to win more users by sharing code they've written to link OpenStack to other tools and infrastructure. The Foundation's decided the time is right to pursue easier integration because it feels the core of …

  1. IGnatius T Foobar
    FAIL

    More likely...

    More likely, OpenStack has kind of lost its lustre. Punters wanted a turnkey solution that would give them an out-of-the-box "Mini AWS". OpenStack is clearly not that. As it turns out, running a cloud is hard! VMware can get you there with vCloud Director but even that takes some effort.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: More likely...

      "VMware can get you there with vCloud Director but even that takes some effort."

      Too right, but less effort than with Open Stack.

      The easy life solution at the moment is Azure Stack.

      1. Maventi

        Re: More likely...

        > The easy life solution at the moment is Azure Stack.

        For a short-term quick win then absolutely yes - Microsoft have a very compelling offering there.

        Putting in hard yards for OpenStack is likely to provide better value long-term though, and helps avoid the lock-in.

        1. handleoclast

          Re: More likely...

          @Maventi

          Even if Microsoft released flawless products every time (they come nowhere near) the lock-in is still the biggest problem. Lock-in is deep within Microsoft's genome. I'm not saying Google is better, just that Microsoft has been doing it longer.

          Yes, Microsoft has open-sourced some development tools. But they sold them at a loss anyway, because without development tools nobody would use the associated product. And giving away the dev tools helps lock people in to the platform..

          Everything Microsoft has ever done has had an eye on lock-in. Because the only alternative to lock-in would be to keep customers by producing good s/w, which is apparently an option they find financially undesirable. I don't see this changing in the future, except changing for the worse.

          So even on those rare occasions when a Microsoft product is better than any alternative, I'd be a lot more likely to take an alternative. The alternative might improve, but Microsoft will never stop lock-in. If the team behind the alternative throw in the towel somebody else might take it on, but if Microsoft drop a product you're completely screwed.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: More likely...

            "Everything Microsoft has ever done has had an eye on lock-in."

            "Everything any cloud provider has ever done has had an eye on lock-in. "

            FTFY

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    People/companies just need to decide if they want to build their own private cloud because they want to deliver IT in similar ways to AWS/Azure or if they just want to consume whatever those two are feeding them. Being able to consume ready-to-use services is always great until you get the bill. If your company isn't excited about transferring the huge license expense they already pay the classic money grubbers (IBM, EMC, HPE, Oracle, Microsoft, etc.) then building some sort of private cloud to make open source solutions more easy to consume for regular users/developers is probably worth your time. The goal should be to drive down costs and moving from one profit-centric scheme to another one is just a bad plan. If you can make Openstack work then do it. If you have to pay VMware their exorbitant license fees to do it then you may as well just go straight to AWS.

  3. Dunstan Vavasour

    Anyone who wanted to run a private cloud..

    ...has been able to do so for several years. The technology has been out there for a while, and it's not going to get any easier as IGnatius writes.

    I've seen places that have successfully built their business model around their private cloud - I've seen other places that have learned that "If you build it they won't necessarily come". But whatever the underlying stack, a cloud has an awful lot of technology in it, and if you want to achieve good availability you'll need to carry an awful lot of skills in your workforce.

  4. Flak

    Make or buy? A simple question of economics

    The question of whether to go AWS/Azure, VM or Openstack can be looked at in different ways, but the main question is economic - what makes most commercial sense for an organisation? From my experience that is driven by projected scale, time to market and available skillset within an organisation.

    Starting from small/temporary to large/permanent, the order of preference/cost effectiveness will most likely move from AWS/Azure to VM to Openstack.

    The challenge is to buy or build right to avoid platform changes later on.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Make or buy? A simple question of economics

      "driven by projected scale, time to market and available skillset within an organisation."

      ...and one more thing: is the infrastructure under the IT service in question a differentiator for your business? If it isn't (email, HR/payroll, accounting...) outsource it in some form, just like you do the catering and the office cleaning. If it is, then own it yourself and invest in it.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    IBM Private Cloud

    FWIW, IBM announced their Private Cloud play and, curiously enough, it doesn't involve using any of their hardware or cloud products to get there. They'd really, really like it you did but VMWare, OpenStack, other clouds and bare-metal have equal weight.

    Poking around on this it's mostly design patterns with a guide, their calling it an advocate, to get you from your people having not a clue to somewhere near or on target. This is one I'm really going to have to go deeper on. Of course, IBM being IBM, one of the design patterns is taking your beastly legacy applications and stuffing them in containers.

    Disclaimer: No relationship with IBM for years, was a developer and repaired ThinkPads. Just thought this is on topic for this article. Ref: https://www.ibm.com/cloud-computing/products/ibm-cloud-private/?S_PKG=&cm_mmc=Search_Google-_-Cloud_Hybrid+Cloud+-+Management-_-WW_US-_-ibm+cloud+private_Exact_&cm_mmca1=000020LH&cm_mmca2=10005438&cm_mmca7=9009551&cm_mmca8=kwd-345660191025&cm_mmca9=d2190907-d5b3-404d-847f-a6d53527e312&cm_mmca10=229529844641&cm_mmca11=e&mkwid=d2190907-d5b3-404d-847f-a6d53527e312|1150|357509&cvosrc=ppc.google.ibm%20cloud%20private&cvo_campaign=000020LH&cvo_crid=229529844641&Matchtype=e

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