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Comment by matt_wulfeck | Hacker News Reader

> As a result, Evernote will be shutting down its previous storage architecture that was based around a private cloud infrastructure, along with some of its own tech.

Good riddance! Deploying Openstack Swift was a nightmare in my personal experience. A few outages and I decided I'll never work a job supporting it again.

If a recruiter mentions "Openstack" to me what I hear is a shamble mess of a services with components you'll be on-call for which will break in unique ways. Oh and of course you're expected to maintain the entire infrastructure while you do your normal job.

Just move to the cloud already.

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The deployment part of OpenStack is why some companies have ceased having multiple solution offerings for their customers. Instead they now offer a single uniform OpenStack distribution that they know can be supported more so than 2+ other distribution and deployment variants of it.

There are a lot of on-premise workloads which cannot be moved to someone else's remote cloud (for varying reasons). This is where OpenStack fills in the gap and provides something better than an ad-hoc brew-it-yourself cloud platform. That being said it still requires a good understanding of the requirements as well as a well chosen distribution to match the foreseen use-cases.

Yeah, because putting your money-maker in someone else's hands is always a great idea /s

It's better to look at each situation, and decide whether the cloud is a good idea or not. Let's stop pretending this is the only good solution.

You are always partially in someone else's hands unless you happen to own a private, dedicated connection to your client.

Sure, but partially != fully

And you can run a dedicated, private client if you want for most services.

Welcome to HFT.

HFT?

High Frequency Trading? Where everything is proprietary and self-contained?

> You are always partially in someone else's hands unless you happen to own a private, dedicated connection to your client.

A listenable connection to your client is entirely different than handing your entire infrastructure and data to a third-party. I fail to see the merit of putting your whole business in the hands of a potential competitor.

CPUs, networking, and storage are not Evernote's money makers. And I'm fairly sure Google's machine learning is a lot better than what Evenote can do.

Anyway, infrastructure in cases like these is really like a public utility. No one says companies are putting their money maker in other's hands because they use public grid electricity (or sewage, or water supply, etc.).

> CPUs, networking, and storage are not Evernote's money makers.

Evernote's money-maker is the sum of those parts.

> No one says companies are putting their money maker in other's hands because they use public grid electricity (or sewage, or water supply, etc.).

Yeah, because that's generally not the product. Those are typically by-products. They happen after the product is produced.

Yeah I tried Openstack swift and while there are some great parts to it, dear god that thing was riddled with piles of python and bash scripts holding everything together hahaha, look maybe I'm wrong I certainly didn't spend long looking through it but I did find it a little 'scary' to say the least.

Were they running OpenStack?

No.

It's why I tell companies who want open stack to use NephoScale http://www.nephoscale.com so it's not solely on their shoulders to fix things.

Openstack swift isn't great, but if you move the proxy/account/container services away from the actual object store, as the read/write requirements are different, and if you opt to run your object store on proper hardware, it will scale well pretty well.

I'm curious as to what really made you hate it. From my vantage point of running openstack in production from Essex to Juno, Openstack Swift after Folsom release was the most reliable part of openstack outside of keystone and glance.

(Nevermind that it was also the easiest to upgrade as well).

Or you can use the ceph stuff, which is also pretty nice.

Agreed. OpenStack is a total dumpster fire, yet still companies like RedHat push it.

I narrowly avoided a long term (career-derailing) OpenStack assignment...four days in...oh, this is all based on OpenStack?...transfer approved

Good to know. For a year or two now, I've felt guilty that I haven't taken the time to learn OpenStack, and felt I was missing out on a career-enriching experience.

So out of curiosity, what did you see about OpenStack that made you go this route?

I myself am a PTL (project technical lead) in one of the OpenStack projects and although I do understand where you are coming from I wonder what the gist of the experience you had was...

Care to share what experiences you have that made you think 'total dumpster fire'?

I know the software isn't perfect, but then what software is? Also I've seen that the OpenStack 'having a bad time experience' is as much of a cultural change as it is a software change; ie, OSS in general isn't a take and not contribute kind of thing, that's not how it really works/gets better.

I worked for a company that did openstack; was pulled into their security team. That company dumped so much money just to have a terrible openstack client offering.

There was no CVE mailing list like other projects. We had to scrape their launchpad bug tracker. On top of that none of the package repos we checked (Canonical's, Debian's .. couple of others) would even have package updates for up to three weeks on some of the CVEs. We started building out own CI so we could build and patch ourselves. Then I got pulled from the open stack team onto something that was not a bottomless pit of haemorrhaging money.

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