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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

> IBM lost the hardware cloud wars

This makes me scratch my head. I heard Power9 is getting more and more traction in some clouds, notably Google's.

Maybe IBM lost the "bog-standard VM-based cloud" wars, where the "standard" is what AWS / GCP / Linode / DO, etc offer. But that space is indeed crowded; doing something where you have little competition makes a lot of sense. (I wonder if they'll be able to.)

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IBM bought SoftLayer 5 years ago, and was unable to capitalize on their niche (bare metal). Instead they decided to double down on provisioning VMs, which SoftLayer was never that great at. The set of features IBM's VM's provides compared to any other modern cloud is terrible (headed backwards in Gartner charts). It's barely getting any better, meanwhile Google/AWS/Azure are gobbing on features.

IBM effectively failed in their integration of SoftLayer. They bought SoftLayer but failed to modernize them. Why will RedHat be any different?

Take a look at what's left of SoftLayer today. Most folks who had the necessary skills to keep their ancient php platform relevant have left a long time ago.

I'm sure IBM is on their 5th iteration of their "next gen" VM provisioning system by now, due out any quarter...

More fatally than that, perhaps: IBM's business model for half-a-century at least including renting time on hardware at as close to commodity costs as IBM could push them (and still make a very healthy profit admittedly). The Cloud model was IBM's invention in a time where computers were expensive. IBM's failure to transition that very business model the company was built upon to a time where computers are plentiful, is like watching an Olympic swimmer forget how to swim in a lake.

SoftLayer is not competitive. It was undercut by Google Cloud since last year, while AWS is not that far off.

Once everyone offers a choice of 1 TB Virtual Machines for rent, SOftLayer will be completely out of the equation. They're strictly worse in services and pricing.

https://thehftguy.com/2018/01/15/the-inevitable-demise-of-ib...

Have they fixed their scheduler? For 5 years nothing has improved in the process of launching VMs. Sometimes it just barfs and goes to hell, requiring contacting support to terminate provisioning.

No joke, at one of the previous places we’ve implemented a task which would raise a support ticket via API if provisioning step was hanging for longer than x minutes. This is the case for years!

According to some people from IBM, the reason why IBM purchased SoftLayer was so they could tell their customers who were looking to move to the cloud „you want cloud, we have cloud” ... and keep the hefty support contract runing.

I think we'll see a trend of cloud fragmentation again, once there are more good cloud software stacks. Imagine something like OpenShift + OpenStack + Ceph that does not suck and can be controlled by something like Terraform and support various types of hardware. That's just a crude example I can come up with quickly to demonstrate the concept. Something like that will enable many more types of players in the market and people can use a mix of them or self host.

It will be good for IBM to be in the middle of this, since the first such stacks will probably come from a large player that doesn't have a dominant existing cloud service. It will also be good for IBM's hardware expertise.

I think this trend will come, companies are getting locked into AWS almost deeper than some companies got themselves nailed to IE6 + .Net at some point. This is fine when the benefits appears to outweigh the risks, until it doesn't.

I've never heard of power 9 getting any traction with Google, short of a press release 4 years ago by them saying IF power9 lived up to the hype, they would consider switching. Since then, I've seen no information that they actually moved any noticeable portion. It's certainly not available publicly. Even IBM didn't have power9 in their own public cloud last I checked.

IBM Helped design a lot of the stuff google uses. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/openpower In addition you have this: https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2018/03/19/head...

All it said is they've deployed power. That could be 1 server or 1000. I think the fact still stands that of IBM doesn't have them in their cloud, who will?

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