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:
Starting from the home page (http://openstack.org), try to download something that will let you run a test stack on your local machine, and run it. Time how long this takes.
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.
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.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.
We're using OpenStack at Bloomberg and we went ahead and published our Chef recipes[1] for building the OpenStack deployment. You can either take a look at these or use these to get a full stack running on your local machine to play with.
As someone who spent 18 months of his life deploying Openstack at scale, I'm confident in pointing out that devstack is, like most of Openstack, half-broken.
Which four clicks? For me, I went to openstack.org, and followed the "Getting Started" link under the "Documentation" heading on the front page. From the getting started page, there are two main (on the top) headings: "Public Cloud" and "Local Dev Environment". Clicking the button under the local option goes to the devstack.org quickstart page (which is also their main landing page). That seems really optimal to me, but I'm not a UI guy, so maybe somebody could come up with a better flow. I'd love to see it!
That's not the same as getting the whole thing running of course, but getting to a simple-looking set of instructions is pretty quick.
Four clicks, but not super obvious, and it takes you to a completely different website. But still, that's not too bad by the standards of enterprise software companies. At least the openstack and devstack websites don't have addresses like "www8.hp.com" (www8, wtf?): http://www8.hp.com/us/en/cloud/helion-overview.html
Hit the 'Getting Started' link at the bottom of the front page, then follow the link under 'Option 2: Local Dev Environment: devstack.org'. I knew what I was looking for, but that might be easier to find than it used to be?
It is a project that basically lets you manage a set of libvirt based host machines. Nothing cloud scale or anything like that just something for a small business.
Here is the architecture. It is too bad this doesn't get more press as it seems simpler and easier to understand.
My take on ovirt is that it is focusing on (moderately) large-scale deployment, albeit only really covering the hypervisor aspect of things , whereas openstack seems to have a broader focus.
I recently evaluated ovirt in a small business context, and one of the stumbling blocks was, "how do I specify which VMs should be automatically run at boot time, and how do I control the order in which they boot?" The current answer to that with ovirt is in effect: "Well, we expect you to have a highly-availble bunch of management nodes which will simply remember what the set of currently running VMs ought to be. If that doesn't float your boat, maybe you should use the API and roll your own control system."
From a small business context this basically amounts to: No.
Note that this is not a serious criticism of ovirt. A project has finite resource, there's only so many things they can focus on at one time, I fully expect that things will improve over time, and the stuff that is there installs and runs very smoothly.
I think of it this way: oVirt is an open source equivalent of VMware vSphere, while OpenStack et al are clones of AWS. The former's less complex, but what most "small" businesses actually need.
I just had local proponents here push OpenStack because they thought it was "cool" to have "cloud-grade" virtualization. It ended up being a pain to deal with and is now being scrapped.
I have twice tried to install DevStack/OpenStack/RDO to get a proof of concept replacement for vCenter up and running and have ran into nothing but half broken implementations. There are so many moving parts under the hood that I am afraid OpenStack will never be anything more then "Enterprise Grade" software running behind dozens of engineers in large corporate data centers. I can get almost any other Virtualization technology up and running in a cluster faster then I can get a single DevStack node up and running.
It took a few hours of following the instructions to the letter but everything worked first time and it's fairly par for the course in terms of installing a complex bit of software.
Agreed. It's difficult at times, but it's completely reasonable for the level of software.
I am going through a complex install at the moment, and I am sitting in IRC with openstack developers to help solve issues.
I've done that with many packages in my life, so I don't think that's odd, but to be fair.. I have no idea how I'd be progressing without asking individuals in IRC on specific points.
Comments
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:
Starting from the home page (http://openstack.org), try to download something that will let you run a test stack on your local machine, and run it. Time how long this takes.
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.
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.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.
We're using OpenStack at Bloomberg and we went ahead and published our Chef recipes[1] for building the OpenStack deployment. You can either take a look at these or use these to get a full stack running on your local machine to play with.
[1]: https://github.com/bloomberg/chef-bcpc#overview
4 Clicks takes you to http://devstack.org/ and installs with 2 commands... git clone https://github.com/openstack-dev/devstack.git then cd devstack && ./stack.sh
As someone who spent 18 months of his life deploying Openstack at scale, I'm confident in pointing out that devstack is, like most of Openstack, half-broken.
Would love to hear more about this. Do you have any blogs or details on your experience?
Which four clicks? For me, I went to openstack.org, and followed the "Getting Started" link under the "Documentation" heading on the front page. From the getting started page, there are two main (on the top) headings: "Public Cloud" and "Local Dev Environment". Clicking the button under the local option goes to the devstack.org quickstart page (which is also their main landing page). That seems really optimal to me, but I'm not a UI guy, so maybe somebody could come up with a better flow. I'd love to see it!
That's not the same as getting the whole thing running of course, but getting to a simple-looking set of instructions is pretty quick.
Four clicks, but not super obvious, and it takes you to a completely different website. But still, that's not too bad by the standards of enterprise software companies. At least the openstack and devstack websites don't have addresses like "www8.hp.com" (www8, wtf?): http://www8.hp.com/us/en/cloud/helion-overview.html
Hit the 'Getting Started' link at the bottom of the front page, then follow the link under 'Option 2: Local Dev Environment: devstack.org'. I knew what I was looking for, but that might be easier to find than it used to be?
Yeah I looked at it and didn't like it. In other words build complexity and features I didn't need or use didn't match up.
I was following this project instead:
http://www.ovirt.org
It is a project that basically lets you manage a set of libvirt based host machines. Nothing cloud scale or anything like that just something for a small business.
Here is the architecture. It is too bad this doesn't get more press as it seems simpler and easier to understand.
http://www.ovirt.org/Architecture
My take on ovirt is that it is focusing on (moderately) large-scale deployment, albeit only really covering the hypervisor aspect of things , whereas openstack seems to have a broader focus.
I recently evaluated ovirt in a small business context, and one of the stumbling blocks was, "how do I specify which VMs should be automatically run at boot time, and how do I control the order in which they boot?" The current answer to that with ovirt is in effect: "Well, we expect you to have a highly-availble bunch of management nodes which will simply remember what the set of currently running VMs ought to be. If that doesn't float your boat, maybe you should use the API and roll your own control system."
From a small business context this basically amounts to: No.
Note that this is not a serious criticism of ovirt. A project has finite resource, there's only so many things they can focus on at one time, I fully expect that things will improve over time, and the stuff that is there installs and runs very smoothly.
I think of it this way: oVirt is an open source equivalent of VMware vSphere, while OpenStack et al are clones of AWS. The former's less complex, but what most "small" businesses actually need.
I just had local proponents here push OpenStack because they thought it was "cool" to have "cloud-grade" virtualization. It ended up being a pain to deal with and is now being scrapped.
I have twice tried to install DevStack/OpenStack/RDO to get a proof of concept replacement for vCenter up and running and have ran into nothing but half broken implementations. There are so many moving parts under the hood that I am afraid OpenStack will never be anything more then "Enterprise Grade" software running behind dozens of engineers in large corporate data centers. I can get almost any other Virtualization technology up and running in a cluster faster then I can get a single DevStack node up and running.
What you presume is that IF this is the case, HP would think this is a problem.
While devstack is not terrible, this project tries to make deployments and testing a bit easier for everyone: http://docs.hpcloud.com/cloudos
You may find the RDO distribution easier to get started with:
http://openstack.redhat.com/Main_Page
http://openstack.redhat.com/Quickstart
Found that in about 30 secs from the OpenStack site.
Did you actually deploy the stack? That's the metric we're after.
I got it going on a box for evaluation purposes by following this guide. http://docs.openstack.org/icehouse/install-guide/install/apt...
It took a few hours of following the instructions to the letter but everything worked first time and it's fairly par for the course in terms of installing a complex bit of software.
Agreed. It's difficult at times, but it's completely reasonable for the level of software.
I am going through a complex install at the moment, and I am sitting in IRC with openstack developers to help solve issues.
I've done that with many packages in my life, so I don't think that's odd, but to be fair.. I have no idea how I'd be progressing without asking individuals in IRC on specific points.
Yes, about 3 months ago. On 16 HP DL380s. Testing a number of vendor apps in our engineering lab.
It doesn't take long to get devstack running.