100% my experience with OpenStack. And the breaking releases every 6 months only add insult to injury.
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.
If the underlying incentives don't coincide with good software you get crappy software.
Distributed operating systems tried to do that for multiple computers, but instead we get ad-hoc crap on top of single machine OS'es. Progress!
We need to move beyond SDN and embrace a point-to-point world where trust is established through pki or similar means. SDNs give a false sense of security, add a ridiculous amount of complexity to routing, and create confusion when it's unclear if there is a hardware problem or a software problem.
SDNs are only there because people aren't innovating enough in other layers.
They add extra failure modes and reduce throughput by decreasing MTU. This is almost all because people want virtual networks with their VMs, rather than just embracing IPv6.
Unless the implementation has bugs. Then, the sensitive area is just a single zeroday away. Airgaps don't have that attack surface.
I agree with your previous point that we should encrypt point to point, but that's one layer up from the problems SDN is solving.
Just for clarification: That was written by bluejekyll, not by me.
The core services are backwards compatible much longer than 6 months from what I've seen. I'm not sure where you got your experience from, but it doesn't sound like Nova, Cinder, Glance, etc.