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Comment by geerlingguy | Hacker News Reader

As someone who's only been on the outside of OpenStack's community, but interested and learning about it a little here and there, could someone give a brief overview of major players and why it seems a number of individuals involved in the OpenStack community have burned out?

Is it really as bad as this post suggests? Many technologies become heavily burdened by too much (non-development) investment and companies doing a land grab on a hot new product; is that the case here?

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Observation: The OpenStack board is controlled by board seats which are mostly held by people employed with large publicly traded companies. At one point I calculated these companies to have a combined market cap of ~US$1/2 trillion.

Blaming Statement: Make no mistake, the companies who control OpenStack are "in it to win it". That's probably not good for innovation or optimization.

Reality: Everything above is a moot point because Docker. Or more specifically, everything above is a moot point because LXC containers. Containers are a better solution layer for developers than instances. Instances are still a good solution layer for providers, but those guys are few and far between, and their margins are thin. No clue what that means for OpenStack, but it can't be good.

Disclaimer: I've helped ~25K people install OpenStack with my scripts. I'm biased and am spending most of my time now with containerization technologies.

>> All of that is a moot point now because Docker.

What made you think OpenStack wasn't into containers? :)

- https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Magnum

- https://www.openstack.org/blog/2015/07/google-bringing-conta...

- http://adrianotto.com/2015/01/announcing-magnum-caas-for-ope...

I know it's a common misconception but OpenStack is not just virtual machines.

It's a stack and many projects with various names do various things, from compute APIs [nova], volume storage [cinder], networking [neutron] to baremetal [ironic] to orchestration [heat] to ...

> Everything above is a moot point because Docker.

OpenStack does more than containerise.

Docker Inc. are racing up the stack to catch juicy value, but so is everyone else.

Red Hat, Pivotal[0] and IBM are already at the top of the stack with OpenShift and Cloud Foundry, so it's getting crowded.

But in the middle there's an awful lot of mechanism required to run an IaaS and OpenStack is the only serious opensource contender around.

[0] disclaimer: I work in Pivotal Labs.

'the only serious opensource contender around', have you heard of Apache CloudStack? It has seen some serious usage: http://cloudstack.apache.org/users.html

I haven't, thanks for the tip.

Racing up the stack doesn't imply you are dragging your ass up the same stack down below. There are some serious contenders in the container space that simply don't require anything below them but bare metal. They don't need virtualization, and microservices practices are being investigated in every company I'm talking to ATM. OpenStack can do whatever the fuck it wants to, but it's not going to be enough to capture massive market share with consumer coders. Like I said up top, OpenStack is destined to play out it's future in a low margin vertical, who's margins are getting lower by the day.

Docker and Openstack are working at very different levels. Kubernetes is a much closer competitor to Openstack.

Docker is not great for multi-tenant environments.

But Intel is trying to solve this with Clear Containers.

Redhat, IBM, Rackspace, HP are pretty major players (and there are users like HP, Bloomberg & IBM research). You can find them https://www.openstack.org/foundation/.

While I don't have any first hand experience contributing to OpenStack (but complained quite a lot back in the old days as user), most of the developers are paid. Obviously OpenStack started out with NASA and (then) Rackspace, so it totally makes sense folks there held the manager/committer/BDFL titles and drove the decisions.

I do agree many of the APIs are awkaward and the Python code is not very Pythonic (classic example: why are attributes with "-" exist?? as user I have to use getattr(object, "OS-XXXX") to retrieve the value). Oh my god.

I hope https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/API_Working_Group (which I'm pretty sure is active @ https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Meetings/API-WG) will make this better in the future. As always feel free to show up :)

I'm not familiar with both OpenStack and Python so I might be totally missing the point but JavaScript has a similar problem with DOM attributes and CSS rules. It accesses them either as strings or as camel cased object properties. Example with jQuery

    el.css({"background-color": "red"})
    el.css({backgroundColor: "red"})

Can Python do the same?

>> Is it really as bad as this post suggests?

That's very hard to quantify, one of the projects (really a library) I work on I'm pretty proud of and I think it's actually somewhat innovative: http://docs.openstack.org/developer/taskflow/ (obviously I'm biased).

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