Gartner: OpenStack Lacks Clarity 77
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:Company claims don't line up with reality? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
translation from Gartner-speak... (Score:5, Interesting)
"This can't be a good technology because they didn't pay us to write the paper. fortunately, our friends did."
Re: (Score:1)
Mostly Ad Hominen is wrong, but there are are some groupings that are so consistently and deliberately wrong that it's the only way to treat things. If Florian says "X company has almost certainly infringed" then you know 100% that that company has not infringed. If that company actually had infringed then their opponents would simply get their lawyers and a few normal lawyers to report the fact. Use of Gartner is the same as use of Florian. It is a clear sign of a weak cause desperately looking for any
What's not clear? (Score:2)
What's not clear or pragmatic about the project goal of taking over the world?
Re: (Score:2)
It just means that Gartner isn't thinking what they're thinking. They think they are, but it had something to do with porcupines and rubber nipples...
Re: (Score:2)
Narf!
Re: (Score:2)
If it helps, corporate software is absolutely just as terrible.
Re:Not A Fan of Gartner but they have some points. (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
There is another difference, which I think is more relevant to Gartner's report. Most crappy corporate software comes with glossy sales brochures written at a level that even an analyst can understand.
Re: (Score:2)
Really? Have you seen Azure? I don't mean "scoffed and dismissed it without knowing shit about it" like many would do.
It works very well and provides a _shitload_ of features, both PaaS and IaaS.
Re: (Score:3)
I find frequent upgrades is better than buggy, under-featured 'enterprise' software that is not updated (as in fixed) for years.
True, though the timing is "convenient" (Score:5, Informative)
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: (Score:3)
I think the timing of his articles are based on his attendance at the OpenStack Summit. Since he is writing the articles after only a week, I don't think the timing is "convenient" but rather "coincidental". Now if he wrote this article 4 months from now and talks about his observation at this conference, I would have been more inclined to believe that they withheld his article until it could be used to counter some major announcement.
Re: (Score:3)
I'm not sure what Occam's razor suggests here, as either explanation seems both simple and plausible. It's only been a couple of weeks since Cisco announced the Insieme arrangement and ACI, too. Perhaps you're right and it's just coincidence, or maybe there is some truth in both theories.
Re: (Score:3)
Fair enough, calling it a crash was probably an overstatement. Still, after a series of bad news reports in recent months, from missed targets to laying off thousands of employees, along with guidance that wasn't exactly glowing in confidence on the last call, their share price has given up most of the gains in the first months of 2013.
Maybe you're right and they'll weather SDN as they've fought off other threats before, but I have a feeling this time really could be different. My simple reason is that a lo
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
Really? AWS and Azure are "giant fucking messes of haphazard spaghetti code that you can _probably_ make work in a large corporation if you put 50 good developers on it and have 100 other people to support the environment?"
You sure about that?
Because those are the commercial packages that do what OpenStack does - and having used both of them, they're pretty goddamned solid.
Re: (Score:2)
Where can I download that thing called AWS and Azure to install on my private cloud?
Re: (Score:2)
VPC is just a clipped off segment of Amazon's cloud. I don't see the offer of the software such that I could build my own private version of their cloud.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Really, can I download all the management tools that Amazon uses in AWS? If you tell me that I can use Xen and other OSS code that Amazon uses will only tell me you don't get what I am talking about
Re: (Score:2)
Really, can I download all the management tools that Amazon uses in AWS? If you tell me that I can use Xen and other OSS code that Amazon uses will only tell me you don't get what I am talking about
A lot of those tools are just shell scripts of middling complexity. Likewise with the web admin apps. It's not trivial, but I could whip out some PHP to drive the shell scripts in - well, not an hour, but probably less than a week for the most important functions.
Then again, I'm used to administering Xen from its primitives, so for me that's mostly just automating stuff I've done many times before.
Re: (Score:2)
Why use experts that are already familiar with a product when you can spend money trying to get your own group of people up to speed?
Re: (Score:1)
Egg Fucking Zactly. Someone else who understands. Everyone wants to reinvent the wheel.
Soon the "cloud" will be as commodity as the "OS". Most companies use distributions of Linux or they use Windows, they don't download millions of lines of shitty, disjointed Python code.
Let people specialize. When you can download OpenStack and easily get it up and running in a real enterprise without a shitload of people do painstakingly slave over it, I'll take it seriously.
Re: (Score:2)
Everyone wants to reinvent the wheel.
As the wise once [qdb.us] said:
(rickest) reinventing the wheel is exactly what allows us to travel 80mph without even feeling it. the original wheel fell apart at about 5mph after 100 yards. now they're rubber, self-healing, last 4000 times longer. whoever intended the phrase "you're reinventing the wheel" to be an insult was an idiot.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It doesn't have a lack of clarity, it has none
It probably doesn't help that at least one of those involved lack an understanding of the word "lack."
Funded by (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Funded by (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Funded by (Score:5, Funny)
I'd be checking IBM's site for a 'Sunrise' product. Of course with IBM's site, I'd have to go back and actually use Google to find it.
Re: (Score:2)
If Gartner predicted the Sun was coming up tomorrow, I'd be wondering who paid them to say it, and what the angle was.
And ... once again we see the need for a mod of "Sad, but true".
Re:Funded by (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Funded by (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
"A lie is best placed between two truths."
Gartner always makes some valid points. They are masters of manipulation.
While it sounds like you're well-informed, the majority of their followers are not and I would go so far as to say those people, even when reading the details presented within, rarely truly understand the content.
Re: (Score:2)
An easy to spot fallacy is when someone claims that facts are no longer facts because someone untrustworthy presented them. It's easy to cross over into the same realm as "those people" you are referring to when doing so.
And "hell yes", I'm guilty of doing the same thing often enough. I don't like to, or do so intentionally, but I am human.
Re: (Score:2)
His point was subtly different though. He doesn't claim that the facts aren't facts because of who wrote about them, he's saying they are well known for slipping non-facts in with the facts and calls for a very careful reading to distinguish the two.
That is perfectly reasonable. One should always give extra scrutiny to anything said by someone with that sort of history.
Re: (Score:2)
Could say the same about Gartner (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Gartner lacks intelligence (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
please.... home clouds can be just as much a proof of concept as an enterprise cloud. how much do you put into it is what counts
Shirley you can't be serious.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Typical techie response which lacks insight into the needs of the rest of the world...
Not that I am defending Gartner - they are a marketing company which publishes positions based on who has paid them money - but the whole "just get the source code and ..." thinking demonstrates a basic lack of understanding for the rest of the world. It is just as bad and just as myopic as Gartner is.
Wait, what? (Score:2)
I'm not sure I've ever seen such a bold example of un-selfawareness...
Alternatives are not good (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Gartner: consistently wrong, for 20 years (Score:1)
Cultivating the OpenStack Garden .. (Score:2)
"The OpenStack community is an awesome software factory which has an awe-inspiring process for managing releases with a continuous integration, source code management, peer review tools so much so that one of its community members has packaged up the process itself as a product offering." ref [tumblr.com]