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.
<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.