It is really funny, I agree with this 100% but also think because of the new norm of instant gratification this person is totally wrong. I have customers that all the time state they want to move to an openstack platform but have no programmers or unwilling to hire programmers. So of course we go down that path, look at the capex and opex and their brains explode. Then we look at aws/azure/vCloud and regular internal cloud with its associated costs and they come back from their heart attacks.<p>If you are a services company, he is right, you should be focusing on outcomes. But, if you can't tell me in 2-3 sentences what problem you are solving and how it benefits the customer you are doing it wrong.<p>This is a world of businesses and businesses need to make money, usually. Everyone gets so caught up on the new hot thing or the new "revolution" or what the competition is doing without thinking of what problem they are trying to solve or what actual value they are providing. This article says they provide outcomes, sure I can provide outcomes by moving you to SAP, or VDI, or hyperconverged, but what problem is this solving?<p>Don't tell me it "cut costs", it rarely does and lots of people smarter than me have shown that cutting costs are not the top priority of most leadership.<p>Back to the point of the article. I have made a lot of money in consulting. I now sell consulting services. You know how I do it? "Yes Mr customer how are you? Cool great, I am fine thanks. So what problems does your organization have, what are your goals, and how can I help you?"<p>Boom. You are all welcome.<p>Don't talk about product or you will lose to me or someone better. Don't talk money or you lose. Don't talk fads or you lose. Talk about the business and how you will help it reach its goals, overcomes it's problems, and grow!
<i>Everybody’s OpenStack software is equally bad. It’s also as bad as all the other infrastructure software out there – software-defined networking, software-defined storage, cloud management platforms, platforms-as-service, container orchestrators, you name it. It’s all full of bugs, hard to upgrade and a nightmare to operate. It’s all bad.</i><p>100% my experience with OpenStack. And the breaking releases every 6 months only add insult to injury.
As MD of a medium-sized UK-based cloud server company (Bytemark, cough), I'm <i>so</i> glad to hear someone else saying this. We made the decision in 2010 to design and build our own cloud services stack - from scratch, ultimately including a low-level storage layer. This was just after Openstack was announced, so it felt like a risk not to get on this particular wagon.<p>We opened our service to customers within a year, and fixed what felt like small silly bugs while constantly racing to keep the platform up. Openstack kept getting richer and puffier and more important-sounding. Even though we thought we would eventually "make the switch" I couldn't for the life of me find any success stories, and looking at the software it seemed to have some crucial gaps that we'd need to fill, and a bunch of layers that we didn't need or care about for our simple "cloud servers" offering.<p>We're at the point where mayyyyybe we could think about switching out one or two components, but my gut feeling is that 1) these are quite simple components for us where our maintenance burden is manageable, 2) our model of VMs is slightly different (more permanent) than Openstack's and, of course 3) the integration effort doesn't seem worth it, and the loss of experience compared to our own software seems a huge risk if it puts the stability of our platform at risk. So it still feels like picking a fight with our own stable software for benefit that was way down the line.<p>We're in exactly the same spot at Boris - our customers care about the service, not the software. There is just so much integration with our own hardware, network, data centre & customer services operation that's outside the scope of Openstack that it never quite seemed relevant.
More provocative over insightful.<p>Infrastructure software isn't dead - but Openstack is.<p>It may still be used, and may continue to see a bit of media now and then but really it's gone the way of Puppet/Cfengine/<many proprietry infra software here>.<p>It missed it's chance to be good by allowing itself to be corrupted a massive design by committee disaster.
Openstack needed a cohesive vision if it was to stand a chance against the integrated enterprise stacks or the custom in-house ones it sought to supplant.
It never had it and at this point it never will.<p>I don't mean any ill-will to any of the Mirantis boys or the other countless hackers that worked on Openstack circa Cinder/Neutron introduction. I was there too, we tried to right the ship before it got too far off-course and we failed.
Many smart people tried to make Openstack good but it was out of the hands of the hackers.
I've been consulting for public sector and the companies in the Fortune 500 that are behind the software and operations curve from even start-up companies and always will by choice + self-imposed bureaucracy. The problem I've observed consistently across various custom cloud and openstack implementations is that none of the products and technologies that people are developing are able to succeed because everyone assumes that they "solved" basic infrastructure management a decade ago when their operations teams are woefully unskilled, unmotivated, and unable to meet the demands of today's environments. Most organizations do not have monitoring beyond what comes out of the box even for production environments, most places do not have defined SLAs, almost nobody tests backups or their DR runbooks even though they spent $2M+ on a DR implementation. None of this is the fault of the engineers though; their managers wanted silos and people that just go implement their promotion-garnering plans that all go south.
Distributed orchestration software is only just starting to become usable. See <a href="http://rancher.com/.." rel="nofollow">http://rancher.com/..</a>. I wouldn't call infrastructure software dead. It's the beginning.<p>I think the problem is that most existing tools/engines/components which make up software systems (e.g. databases, memory stores, frameworks, etc...) were designed to run on a single machine and so far, it's been the DevOps' responsibility to scale them manually. Even for those components which DO support clustering; their approach is often not compatible with most orchestration systems (they tend to micromanage the cluster - Instead of micromanaging the cluster and thereby fighting the orchestrator, the focus should be on writing simple hooks for the orchestrator to invoke).<p>Developers of tools/engines/components need to change their mindset and start building engines from the ground up to run on distributed orchestration software like Kubernetes, Swarm or Mesos and automatic scalability has to be BUILT INTO every component/service.<p>A major problem is that there seems to be a massive skill divide between DevOps/SysAdmins and Software Developers - Software devs think of systems like Kubernetes and Swarm as being the responsibility of DevOps people and don't spend enough time thinking about how it impacts them. This is the wrong attitude - The two skillsets need to converge in order to build effective solutions.<p>Orchestration management tools are the new operating systems - In the same way that one can build apps/systems which are compatible with Linux, Windows or OSX, we should build apps/systems which are compatible with Kubernetes, Swarm or Mesos.<p>There is more to these orchestration tools than just writing up config files - The code within the components themselves have to be designed to play nice with the automatic scheduling/orchestration requirements.
Well everyone is making money except docker. Drives the point home I think. Docker's business is docker and you can't really make money with it whereas everyone else is building a business on top of docker to deliver outcomes to customers.
Heh, it's like <a href="http://dtrace.org/blogs/wesolows/2014/12/29/fin/" rel="nofollow">http://dtrace.org/blogs/wesolows/2014/12/29/fin/</a> but from a different angle.<p>I personal, naive as it sounds, beleive nix* (as in e.g. NixOS) could be a silver bullet here, but the market is so used to IT being inherently shitty I don't believe it will happen.
'Infrastructure software' is a too general simplication. If you break down infrastructure software the OP would find many types of software in this field which aren't dead.
IaaS vendor says that companies don't want to host their own infrastructure, more at 11.<p>I tried to get a neutral take on this, but it reads far too much like a sales pitch, even for vendor blog levels.
"And the reason Mirantis has been successful is because, despite ourselves, outcomes are what we’ve been able to deliver to our customers by complementing crappy OpenStack software with hordes of talented infrastructure hackers that made up for the gaps.<p>This is't really a ringing endorsement of your business is it? It's nice that he acknowledges a talented team but to refer to your core product as "crappy" is more than a little depressing in my opinion.
He is basically saying "don't ever count on openstack becoming non-crappy, we have a vested interest in keeping it crappy so that to get anything done you will still need to pay mirantis to deploy 'hordes of talented infrastructure hackers". Well, thanks for honesty.
<i>> But none of this matters, because today customers don’t care about software. Customers care about outcomes.</i><p>Why "today"? Hasn't this always been the case? It sounds essentially like a rephrasing of Paul Graham's advice: "Make something people want."
Only slightly facetious, but if they are trying to decouple containers from one another then perhaps they should consider a basic Inversion of Control design principle.<p>Perhaps that's the job of the orchestrator already though.
I presume because people still need to run "private cloud" - because of regulation, national borders or not quite trusting AWS with your heart mind and ballsack.
Maybe commercial software is dead.<p>We all want it, except for some youngins.. how long can the corporate marketplace defy the will of the people who fuel the market?<p>Free software is the future. The benefits to mankind are too great.