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Comment by subtextminer | Hacker News Reader

Any views or experiences evaluating OpenStack instead of one of the big ones AWS/Azure/GCP? OpenStack has a bad rep due to added complexity and limited developer tools that may lead to ultimately higher TCO but I wonder if this similar to what Linux was like roughly pre-2005 before becoming commercially robust and refined enough to replace many corporate-level server operating systems.

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Linux was a corporate-level operating system as far back as the mid-90s. It was the late 90s when it started getting enterprise software for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Database released Oracle 8 was released for Linux in 1997.

Enterprise Linux was getting going for real in the late 1990s but in my view it was more 2005-ish that it became "mainstream" in these sphere. Sun Computer for example started to support Linux in 2006 and was a Hail Mary to try to save itself as SunOS was being eaten away by Linux.

Redhat Inc became part of the Nasdaq-100 in 2005.

I make this comparison as the question is whether OpenStack still has the potential to become a full go-to alternative in the way that clients consider closed cloud systems from AWS/GCP/Azure as substantial equivalents.

I see your point but disagree. Sun was the last holdout of the propriety Unix vendors to support Linux because they had underpriced the other Unix vendors like Linux was underpricing them. Sun's whole idea was to create cheap Unix workstations by using commodity parts and having a low-cost Operating System in SunOS and then Solaris.

Becoming a Nasdaq-100 company is a trailing indicator of going mainstream. By 2005 RedHat and Enterprise Linux had won, and Sun had about 5 years before Oracle purchased them.

OpenStack is great if you want to manage your own data center and some companies should do that. It is a cost/benefit analysis that some will make on the side of doing their own thing.

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