openstack team mailing list archive

[Ryan Lane <rlane@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> According to the statement of this article from Gartner
> group http://blogs.gartner.com/lydia_leong/2012/04/03/citrix-cloudstack-openstack-and-the-war-for-open-source-clouds/ Openstack is a
> highly immature platform.
> But why? What's make Openstack so immature?
>
> Any comments on that?
>
> Thank you in advance :)
>

I agree that it's an immature platform. That said, it's also a very
young platform and isn't that to be expected? There's a number of
things that need to be fixed before I'd ever recommend Nova's use in
production:

1. There's no upgrade path currently. Upgrading requires fairly
substantial downtime.
2. Live migration is broken. Utterly.
3. Every release fixes so many things that it's really important to
upgrade every time; however, only one release will likely be supported
every Ubuntu LTS release, meaning you're either stuck with a really
old (likely broken) version of nova, or you're stuck will a very
likely unstable version of Ubuntu. This will be easier over time, when
nova is more stable and has less bugs, but it's incredibly painful
right now.

That said, I feel OpenStack's strengths greatly outweigh its
immatureness. I ran a private cloud at my last organization using a
VMWare ESXi cluster. It was more mature, upgrades worked
appropriately, live migration was solid, etc. I had (and still have)
the choice to run VMWare for my current project and am extremely happy
with my choice of OpenStack. The flexibility provided by the platform
and my ability to contribute to its future make its immaturity a
non-concern. Every release gets closer and closer to a stability point
I'm comfortable with.

This article isn't bad news. In fact, I'd say it shows that
competitors see OpenStack as a fairly major threat. We should be
celebrating this ;).

- Ryan