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Comment by izak30 | Hacker News Reader

I work at Nebula, I'm happy to answer any questions.

Hi, first off...the Nebula One looks great, really hope to try it out someday at work.

Regarding the underlying framework, I'm not very familiar with OpenStack (we use CloudStack right now), but is this a proprietary fork of OpenStack or are you guys moving the project forward upstream?

Hi, I'm a nebula employee and I have been a key contributor to OpenStack since its founding. We have not forked OpenStack and we are committed to making the upstream project a success. We have some proprietary pieces around the control plane, storage and UX, but we will continue to participate heavily in upstream development and plan on integrating more OpenStack pieces as they stabilize.

Hi Vish! When you say "proprietary pieces around the control plane", does that mean inside or outside of nova?

Outside of nova.

Congrats guys! Keep up the good nebula work :-)

We're pushing a _ton_ upstream and we don't have any proprietary forks.

A cliudstack vs openstack article that happened to be open in the next tab in my browser: http://cloud.mammatustech.com/our-company/news-feed/cloudsta...

Cloudstack as it stands currently is a bit scary to me. They moved from being fully supported by Citrix to an Apache project which may or may not be fully supported by Citrix? Given that there are few contributors to the project, unlike with OpenStack, losing Citrix support I would see as essentially the project dying.

This looks very compelling. There is huge demand from large (enterprise/govt) companies for cloud solutions they can run on in-house hardware. I'm actually not that familiar with what you get from OpenStack out of the box, after the Nebula has provisioned everything, can the customer just start writing over HTTP? NFS? Is Active Directory integration supported? What is done to ensure data integrity on the storage long term?

We support the swift API for object storage. A single system keeps many replicas, it's analogous to an AZ in s3 if you're familiar with AWS.

OpenStack provides virtualization, storage and networking services. You have the basic gist, once nebula provisions everything, you can interact immediately with the system, provisioning virtual machines and storing data.

You can use a browser-based web dashboard or REST apis to interact with the system. Object storage (think S3) is exposed externally, block storage is supported, but it isn't currently exposed outside the system (its for vms only). AD integration is in the works.

I'll be the first victim...

Why is a cloud platform company pushing hardware?

Edit: Sorry you answered me on the other thread.

I was under the impression that Nebula's sole mission was to further OpenStack, but I suppose that was a misunderstanding. To clarify, is it Nebula's long-term goal to sell hardware?

what other thread?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5478775

Yeah, many people are furthering OpenStack by 1) building on it, in an open-source (or combined OSS+Comercial) fashion, and 2) Selling Consulting and Services. We are doing it by making an appliance that you plug servers into and get OpenStack.

Developing the hardware gives us full control over orchestration and updates and many many other areas.

We do have many of the contributors of OpenStack under one of our roofs (Mountain View, Seattle, Remote) and we do contribute a ton to OpenStack, both in code and the Foundataion. As far as the company goes, yes, we are a computer systems company, making hardware and software.

Having a hardware device reduces the number of things you have to worry about not being under your control.

For example, what networking are you going to use? Arista? Great. What's their latest supported APIs for Quantum? Well, they just changed (as in, last I heard they had a pull request open to OpenStack Quantum for support). OK. So Arista's API is now stable, great. Do they actually support what you want to do with your end devices?

What are you going to install Glance onto? Is the hardware going to be good enough? SSD? How fat will the pipe be into the switch? Dual homed? Quad? Is that going to fast enough if you want to spin up 100 VMs at once?

etc. etc.

Looks really cool. Is this even remotely within the budget of later stage startups, or is it really targeted at the enterprise?

The other article listed a $100,000 price-point per controller. I guess at that point it depends on the size of the start-up.

Plus a per-server charge after the initial 5(?). The Register article was questioning the cost of the additional server license (5 - 10k per node), but having seen a lot of the pricing out there, it seems inline to be a little cheaper than what the big-boys will charge for their management platforms (without the services).

Honestly, if I was CTO at a start-up: OpenStack, a stack of cheap machines, maxed with memory and disks (if required), Open vSwitch, a standard 48 port 10gbps switch (though you can probably get away with 24 ports), open to all staff.

Setup of OpenStack may take a little longer, and it won't scale without serious work, but it will be cheaper and easier to control costs than spinning up AWS.

Oh for sure. OpenStack is going to be way cheaper in the near AND long term than AWS, if you know what your growth rate will look like. I've said it time and time again on here when 'Cloud' stuff comes up, that you MUST as a company do the math if 'Cloud' or in-house services (Cloud?) will be more reasonable.

I think the main pain-point that is being fixed here is that initial setup of OpenStack. I've been doing this stuff for many, many years and it give ME a headache. It truly is that bad (and deploying with Puppet or Chef only lessens the pain while adding different layers of complexity).

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