Here's a fun test I like to do with people who want me to get started with OpenStack, the system that HP is backing:<p>Starting from the home page (<a href="http://openstack.org" rel="nofollow">http://openstack.org</a>), try to download something that will let you run a test stack on your local machine, and run it. Time how long this takes.<p>For me, it took over 50 clicks, searches, etc. and two hours of time before I figured out how to get the stack up and running. It was one of the most frustrating technology experiences I've had in recent memory. The website is a labyrinthine, confusing morass of marketing gobbledygook that I found difficult to get important details from, at least for developers as an audience.<p>I think OpenStack has a long way to go in terms of technical usability before I'd consider trying it out again. That was months ago (August 2013), so maybe things have improved, but I haven't worked up the courage to try again just yet.<p>P.S. OpenStack devs: I'd be happy to have a conversation about it! I would love to be told that my experience was anomalous and get a reason to give it another shot.
OpenStack 2014 somehow reminds me a lot of OMG/CORBA 1993. It's interesting to watch the industry repeat itself.<p>Checklist:<p>- Anybody but "x" club, where X is the market leader. Openstack has vascillated between VMware and AWS here, CORBA had Microsoft.<p>- Large investments advertised as a penis swinging contest between HP, IBM, and others<p>- Chasing aging technology architecture as a panacea instead of building the next generation.<p>CORBA was chasing distributed objects, but the Web and REST was what really was going to matter. Today the big guys are chasing the IaaS model when we have a new generation of platform and application clouds (Mesos, YARN, CoreOS, Docker, CF, Asgard) growing out there.<p>The vendors will of course try to recoup their investment through reference architectures and "best practices" that tell customers they should have a multi-layer SaaS or PaaS running on an IaaS, even though lightweight alternatives like CoreOS will chug along doing nothing of the sort.<p>This is similar to how CORBA's IIOP was promoted to be the way to do "real work" with C++ or Enterprise JavaBeans in your middle tier, but this "Web" HTTP thing can be relegated to the front tier. I know fixed income systems around 1999 that literally wouldn't use HTTP for their blotter updates, with the lead devs insisting such events needed to be pushed over IIOP even though the front end was an IE control in a VBX. (this was shortly before TIBCO had effectively seized the market data industry)<p>- persistent flame wars about governance and architecture of said standard on the social media of the day<p>- Vendor adoption drastically outpacing customer adoption , developing a "buying customers" effect<p>This is not to say OpenStack is bad. There is value, potentially a lot of value, as there was with CORBA. That's all case-by-case. Just saying that vendor love fests rarely indicate a true revolution and most often are just an orchestrated marketing game by the current losers.
So I recently saw a keynote by someone on OpenStack at LOPSA-East and as a System Administrator it kind of scares me. I'm finally starting to understand the meaning, reasoning behind & the fervor behind DevOps & why some organizations have such a need for better DevOps in their organization.<p>At the same time I also see Dev taking more care of Ops & cutting us (Sysadmins) out entirely. How do I take advantage of this or get ahead of this curve? I know there will always be a niche for small time System Administrators who administer small offices, primarily use Windows, etc. but after that ... we're done for.
So HP will spend $1bn over two years on cloud while Google is spending twice that a quarter and Amazon and Microsoft spend that a quarter on capex mainly on cloud. It is not clear they are a serious player. Rack space has spent more than that already.
A private cloud seems like a good choice for larger organizations. They still have some admin and/or devops overhead that they would not have using AWS, Compute Cloud, Azure, etc. But, they might save a lot of money by providing developers with Heroku-like platform services but running on their own more cost effective hardware.<p>For startups with a few people, private clouds might not be a good ideas. Any supporting cases that show the opposite?<p>I would be interested to see co-ops where individuals and small companies join together to build and operate private clouds for the benefit of their co-op members.
I think this article misunderstands HP's definition of service provider. From what I understand HP considers service providers to be SAAS, IAAS, Hosting, and Managed Service Providers, not only telecommunications and ISP. I'm working for a VAR that has made this definition of service provider into a vertical and we have seen massive growth in this space. A lot of companies are making this distinction now, after seeing their existing hardware sales to SMB drying up as services shift to the cloud.
Attention companies going public in the near future: this is how you raise your stock price<p>And why do you do this? Because you're paid in stock and actual internal projects are not going to "wow" analysts. When in doubt spend money on what's popular.
This news has killed Rackspace stock, RAX is down tremendously for the last week (although up today). Quarterly earnings come out next quarter, and those have been bad every first quarter so far if memory serves me. So probably not going to trend up. I don't own any rackspace stock and I'm not making predictions anyone should bet on. I'm just complaining because Rackspace has really good products and it's getting pummeled. Down more than 60ish% since its height a year or so ago.<p>In related news, rax being cheaper make it a bargain for an acquisition, P/E is around 40 now.