"That software we've got causes us so many problems, it's disaster! When we get the new software everything will be fixed."<p>X to Y
Y to X
A to B
B to C<p>MongoDB to this
MySQL to that
Why we switched
Why we switched back<p>blah blah<p>It's one of the oldest themes in computers - man, this software is crap - that new software will fix all our problems! Until you find the problems with the new.<p>Precisely the same age is the new software vendor harnessing all that negative energy about the competitor and megaphoning the "man, the new will fix the old, we're so excited!"<p>Having said that, I have worked with the compute servers of all the major cloud vendors and Amazon must be credited for the quality and consistency of its AWS systems, and Google and Microsoft's cloud computing is in almost all respects equally good - there is as far as I can tell absolutely no reason to choose Amazon over Microsoft Azure (yes, even for Linux systems) or Google Compute Engine. In some areas of functionality GCE and Azure I found to work much more easily and smoothly than Amazon. When I went to work with OpenStack I immediately found the lack of completeness, inconsistency and lack of polish characteristic of many open source projects - trying to do simple things instantly became hard problems.
It's a bizarre article. On one hand I understand their frustration with OpenStack. On the other hand, if they expected to pretty much build their own AWS without any warning bells going off all over the place I find it very hard to be sympathetic - they're not remotely large enough for that. If they'd set their goals lower they could have had a very capable system fairly easily.<p>That they're having problems getting load balancing working properly is a real sign that their ops team just didn't know what they're doing.
As part of my job I teach some classes and give the occasional conference talk. As a result, I've spoken to dozens of people who have tried to adopt OpenStack and eventually gave up. There are a lot of reasons. But I also happen to know a very senior technical person with OpenStack - and he described a completely dysfunctional organization. I wish that there were some way to stop these organizations that are wasting people's time - maybe somebody could sue them out of business for the good of the industry?
I'd be really interested in the actual technical problems The Guardian had with OpenStack and what's the current situation with the OpenStack project. The company I work for has some interest on the platform but I am not aware what to expect (problems, new features etc) from it in its current state.<p>A couple of years ago I experimented with and compared some open source cloud platforms. Admittedly my knowledge is old, but alredy then I was wondering the hype and visibility of the OpenStack project. While it has many big-name supporters that guarantee its lucrativeness for the enterprise, its feature set and flexibility was seriously behind other open source alternatives.<p>Back then I fell for OpenNebula because even though it had its warts it already delivered many features (especially concerning hybrid clouds and heterogenous virutalization environments) that OpenStack still had on its future roadmap.
Andrew Clay Shafer called it in 2013:
<a href="https://stochasticresonance.wordpress.com/2013/11/04/openstack-a-plea/" rel="nofollow">https://stochasticresonance.wordpress.com/2013/11/04/opensta...</a><p>In a former life, I was frustrated by the futility of trying to be involved with the Openstack project. My next phase was to warn people away.<p>Now I wonder why I bothered. Years later it's apparent that I was right, but what benefit do I see from that? Better to aggressively ignore bad technology and spend effort on the stuff that looks promising.
There's little substance to this other than "OpenStack is hard, let's go AWS!" - I would have liked to hear where exactly they ran into difficulties and what the problem was in detail. This is for two reasons:<p>1. "We have switched some components in our software stack" without much info is not an interesting story to read.<p>2. I have friends who work on OpenStack in RH who would I'm sure be very interested to know the sort of troubles that The Guardian had so if there is a usability or functionality issue it can be addressed.
You know, there's probably a sweet spot between "AWS all the things!" and "We will build our own cloud"<p>I mean geesh, people have been building small clouds since there were servers. That's the way mom and dad did it, and by gummity it oughta be good enough for you. The "new" stuff was autoscaling, PaaS, and so forth.<p>So build out a few servers for content management and publishing, then write very small amount of code to push what you have out to a CDN. If you want realtime data capture, capture it using AWS (or whatnot) and pull it back locally.<p>I'm not saying that's optimum for every solution, just that the all-or-nothing kind of thinking is probably what lured them into building their own cloud in the first place. You need a cloud for some stuff, so use a cloud. But you don't need a cloud for every freaking thing the company does. Its assets in the form of text content, internal docs, and branding are probably extremely small in modern terms.
It's a bit scary that Amazon AWS is the only complete solution in this space now.<p>There are so many open projects in the cloud space that one would think it's a solved problem.<p>Here's a list off the top of my head:<p>1. Docker - Container implementation.<p>2. Kubernets - Manage a cluster of Linux containers.<p>3. Mesos - Manage a cluster of resources (not just containers, I'm guessing there are some feature overlap with Kubernets).<p>4. CoreOS - An OS specialized in running containers.<p>5. RethinkDB, CouchDB, Cassandra - Distributed databases<p>6. Ceph, GlusterFS - Distributed file systems<p>7. RabbitMQ, NSQ, NATS - Distributed queue systems.<p>8. Manage VM's in a Data center ?? - I don't know any projects in this space.<p>What's missing is an interface to manage all these together. Maybe this is the direction OpenStack should be heading?
Related read:
<a href="https://www.packet.net/blog/how-we-failed-at-openstack/" rel="nofollow">https://www.packet.net/blog/how-we-failed-at-openstack/</a>
I know cloud everything is the modern way to go, but isn't the Guardian just a glorified blog? Why could they not just push out their content to a series of load balanced static iron severs? Call a cron job every 5 minutes and be done with it.
I've always been introgued by the Guardian's focus on building its own technology. It seems a "bold" strategy, given that tech is not its core business and the newspaper part of the group (which is pretty much all that remains now, since they've sold off their other assets) has been consistently losing money for some time now. I wonder if that strategy would still be in place if it wasn't owned by a not-for-profit trust.<p>Other publishers who have gone down the "We're a tech company!" route have been forced to give up on that strategy[1]. I wonder whether the Guardian will be able to make that breakthrough, or whether they'll end up migrating to Wordpress or something similar.<p>1: <a href="http://digiday.com/publishers/gawkers-kinja-retreat-shows-false-hope-in-publishers-licensing-tech/" rel="nofollow">http://digiday.com/publishers/gawkers-kinja-retreat-shows-fa...</a>
I’ve used Openstack at my current $dayjob and I’d say that Openstack is probably one of the buggiest solutions that I’ve ever used. Even simple things like stopping or resizing VM-s sometimes failed completely and the VM came unusable after that. Feature wise it’s also lacking. Seems that Openstack spends more time/money on marketing and generating hype than creating a good solution.
I’d even say that Docker has a somewhat similar problems, they spend more on hype/marketing than creating a stable and usable solution. However, at least Docker is more usable right now than a year ago, the same can’t be said about Openstack.
"we have had to host it on physical tin". Is this an English English thing? In America, we would say "host on our own iron". Do other countries use different metals?
money no object then? Of course not. Safe harbour is a huge problem in EU AWS breaking the rules. The G could find itself in a sticky regulation mess when people start suing for data breeches.
Stephen Gran, the senior integrator charged with getting OpenStack to work and who wrote fulsomely about it left the Guardian in March 2014 according to LinkedIn.
Going off-topic here, but the AWS logo used in the article seriously looks like a cheap knock-off version.<p>Edit: apparently they sourced it from Wikimedia Commons, which has a rather... shoddy replica.