Hacker News Reader

Comment by kordless | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

>> 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 ...

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

> 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.

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.

'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.

Docker is not great for multi-tenant environments.

But Intel is trying to solve this with Clear Containers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com