Gartner: OpenStack Lacks Clarity

An anonymous reader writes with a quick bite from El Reg: "The OpenStack open-source project has come in for criticism from a Gartner analyst because the claims made by companies frequently don't line up with reality. In a forthright post published on Tuesday Gartner analyst and research director Alessandro Perilli chided the OpenStack community for a lack of clarity, lack of transparency, lack of vision, and lack of pragmatism." An OpenStack developer disagrees, and instead suggests that the perceived lack of clarity is just a result of the open development process. You just don't get to see which Amazon cloud projects fail since they are hidden behind the corporate wall.

Re:Not A Fan of Gartner but they have some points.

[TheRaven64]

There's a difference, which is that most crappy corporate software isn't attempting to define standards and a platform for everyone else to build on top of. OpenStack claims to be developing a vendor-agnostic standard and reference implementation for interoperable systems.

Could say the same about Gartner

[DarkOx]

Its funny, I would apply almost all those same vague criticisms to Gartner.

I wish people would just quick subscribing to the pay to play crap opinion pieces they try to pass off as research. Its painful obvious to anyone who actually has to /use/administer/support/deploy an IT product where it falls in the "magic quadrant" has more to do with the market cap of the company behind it, that the products own merits.

True, though the timing is "convenient"

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

This was my impression, too. OpenStack has a lot of potential, but look at the way a "competitor" like Apache's CloudStack is presented, and the documentation and UIs for configuring OpenStack do seem to be much less developed if there's much there at all. There's an interesting comparison here [mirantis.com], though it is more than a year old now.

Still, I doubt the timing of these comments on the Gartner blog are coincidental, given the pressure the big networking hardware companies have been under and the threat to them that SDN [wikipedia.org] represents.

For example, Cisco's stock price has been crashing for some time, and things like blowing a billion-dollar deal with Amazon [businessinsider.com] aren't helping their prospects or, presumably, their share price. The same site (it's Business Insider, so apply your own level of confidence in anything they say) describes Cisco's response as 'a confusing array of products named "Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI)"' [businessinsider.com], but one thing we do know ACI is that much of it will be unavailable until next year.

I have no insider knowledge of who might have "encouraged" this particular set of comments from Gartner, but Big Networking is probably a fairly regular "customer", so I have at least one plausible theory. :-)

Re:Funded by

[s.petry]

While I agree with your point, I have to also agree with a few of the points Gartner's analyst made. Ever try to implement OpenStack? Some things are okay (Virtual Machines), but other things are horribly convoluted (Virtual Routing). Version upgrades break previous functionality, and documentation is lacking so finding what actually broken requires lots of time and effort. Waiting for the documentation to catch up is fine until you need a feature or bug fix in the latest version.

I'm not claiming that it's horrible mind you, but rather pointing out that it needs some time to mature. Gartner's opinion does not mention the fact that OpenSource products like this can do very well (Apache, Linux, MariaDB/MySQL). At the same time, enough OpenSource projects fall off the Earth to have some concerns.