Scott Lowe has been live blogging a storm about sessions he is attending at the OpenStack conference in Australia. I’ve been reading them avidly but this section jumped out at me.
Ramraj starts the session, introducing the speakers and setting some context for the presentation. Ramraj and Mathot are with DXC, a managed services provider. Ramraj starts with a quick review of some of the tough battles in OpenStack deployments:
- Months to deploy OpenStack at scale
- Chaos during incidents due to lack of OpenStack skills and knowledge
- Customers spend lengthy periods with support for troubleshooting basic issues
- Applications do not get onboarded to OpenStack
- Marooned on earlier version of OpenStack
- OpenStack skills are hard to recruit and retain
Since most Enterprises are running VMware for their infrastructure lets change out ‘OpenStack’ for VMware ….
- Months to deploy VMware Cloud Foundation at scale
- Chaos during incidents due to lack of VMware Cloud Foundation skills and knowledge
- Customers spend lengthy periods with support for troubleshooting basic issues
- Applications do not get onboarded to VMware Cloud Foundation
- Marooned on earlier version of VMware vCloud Director
- VMware Cloud Foundation skills are hard to recruit and retain
This reads the same as the OpenStack grievances.
Its a Cloud Problem
Its really a cloud problem:
- Months to deploy a Cloud at scale
- Chaos during incidents due to lack of Cloud skills and knowledge
- Customers spend lengthy periods with support for troubleshooting basic issues
- Applications do not get onboarded to the Cloud
- Marooned on earlier version of Cloud
- Cloud skills are hard to recruit and retain
You could take it a step further and replace Cloud with ‘technology’ and it would be still be correct. I’ve heard these complaining noises for 30 years for every new technology. Somehow OpenStack gets complained about the most and I don’t understand why.
OpenStack is free of licensing costs, and you should be able to invest in people to make it work. The problem is that there is no one else to blame when it goes wrong.
Reminder: blaming a vendor is unlikely to fix a problem, you will probably work around it while waiting for a response from tech support.
Expectations and hype. Same as always. (You could throw in “Lack of sustained commitment by vendors who should know better.”)
Two years of OpenStack and vendors gave up. Internally it takes two years just to get a project started, much less deliver a result. The hypocrisy appears pretty bad.