Amazon is way ahead of everyone else in the cloud space. Their closest rivals (Microsoft & Google) are pretty much copying AWS. Most of Azure's services are equally proprietary and I doubt that will ever change.
This just leaves the other smaller players (DigitalOcean, Joyent, Rackspace, etc) who are mostly offering something akin to EC2 and then partnering with other vendors to offer the missing pieces on top (frankly what other choice do they have? They can't get into a race with Amazon/Google on who can build the most no. of services - they will never win that race).
i agree with this comment completely. As an aws user, they have just done a great job in the cloud space. For anyone to really over take them, they'll have to come up with something radically different because the product is that good.
I worked on and around Openstack for 18+ months. I think ignoring it is pretty safe to ignore at this point.
<rant>
There might come along something that is actually good, but Openstack isn't it. The architecture is just bad, it will never be as reliable as something like AWS. (not because of scale, purely because of lack of error handling capabilities)
Reality is these sorts of orchestration systems need to be written by specialists. The vast majority of Openstack was written by people that admit they have no clue about systems level programming. This is what hype does, it forces a whole bunch of bad programming and architecture down everyones throats.
The marketecture and hype machine have done horrible things to Openstack. Not only have vendors riddled the thing with lockin and crap code that needs to be supported, but they have pushed entire projects that should have been shot in the head. cough Ceilometer cough
There is security, performance and plain availability problems everywhere, mostly embedded deep in the architecture.
Dumb decisions like "All systems must be Python" when Python is clearly not suited to a large number of the things they want to do is painful. As is the general "not invented here" syndrome and boys club that leads to certain libraries or patterns being pushed over others, usually to the peril of the project due to the 'blessed' thing being incomplete and unproven.
</rant>
I don't intend on returning to Openstack if I can avoid it, unfortunately my skill-set does tend towards that sort of thing so we will see how I go.
OpenStack's model seems to be "clone what Amazon does, 18 months later then hand over to vendors who don't have the scale to match Amazon's prices"
It's kind of nice in theory for internal clouds.
But I'm increasingly seeing tooling targeting Docker instead of OpenStack at the service level for doing the same kinds of things OpenStack is supposed to offer (ie, the service utilities Docker to offer automatic deployment/availability/loadbalancing instead of doing it using the OpenStack APIs).
At the cloud vendor layer, the differences between vendors can be abstracted using libraries, which removes an alleged attraction of OpenStack.
Given that, I see a few vendors challenging Amazon by building unique selling points (Google has some innovative things as does Microsoft, and Digital Ocean pushes the price/performance thing).
I see Docker taking away a lot of the "cross cloud deployment" attraction that OpenStack had, and doing it better.
So what does OpenStack offer end users? (I understand it's attractions to vendors, and maybe the internal cloud use case).
When you are actually using it as a private cloud for multiple internal clients I can kind of see the point (as I mentioned in my previous comment).
If not, then what utility is OpenStack providing?
Bare metal works well. I see many people using either Docker on bare metal or maybe a VM layer as an additional security layer, but using Docker as the deployment target.
The utility it is providing is deployment/management of the underlying resources. Docker does not do that. Some of the stuff people are building on top of/around Docker will provide it, but it's not there.
But I agree with you that OpenStack is not good enough to be worth it for that with perhaps the exception of very large multi-tenant deployments (in which case, my first goal would be to start rewriting large chunks of it). And parts of it are just so horribly over-engineered it is scary, because it makes me wonder what it is they're missing to think it was necessary to make things that convoluted, and what they're missing because they've made it so convoluted.
> And parts of it are just so horribly over-engineered it is scary, because it makes me wonder what it is they're missing to think it was necessary to make things that convoluted, and what they're missing because they've made it so convoluted.
So the source code for Amazon Web Services is clearly architected, free of cruft and under-/over-engineering? I assume you've worked with AWS's source code in order to be able to make such a comparison. In my experience, the design and architecture of closed-source internal applications delivered to customers only as a front-end is usually a nightmare.
I mildly degree with your assertion that the Docker tools aren't there yet. Some are pretty usable, and additionally if you include the category of DevOps tools then they are pretty good.
I agree entirely with you on the rest of your comment.
I've still to meet someone using it. Everyone uses aws; you hear people complaining about google compute's problems; I even hear people using eucalyptus. I've never met anyone using openstack (and I've been to aws conferences).
This just leaves the other smaller players (DigitalOcean, Joyent, Rackspace, etc) who are mostly offering something akin to EC2 and then partnering with other vendors to offer the missing pieces on top (frankly what other choice do they have? They can't get into a race with Amazon/Google on who can build the most no. of services - they will never win that race).