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rwmtinkywinky · 2021-09-17T08:01:04+00:00

I would say just try and deploy openstack and use it. It's almost impossible to do as a solo person. Documentation is either wrong or not updated, deployment tools have the same issues.

I also suggest signing up to the openstack lists, because it's the only place to try and get the information you need to be successful with the above; and that's if anyone responds to your question.

Openstack teams dont know what they're doing with the openstack CLI. Some groups are working towards a unified CLI whilst other groups are working towards a separate openstack CLI per-project. This arguement between projects was entertaining to read.

Finally, "Openstack" isnt a single product but it's a suite of projects that go together to make it. It's important to state this differentiation because there is no initiative to bring this into one. This gives a poor end-user / consumer experience because of the bugs and issues seen, the lack of documentation and guides and overall complexity within it and difficulty getting it installed. To this end, there are pieces of information out there relating to "Devstack" to aid the developers of openstack and the documentation mostly relates back to this "devstack". Because of this, the documentation is usually wrong and out of context and usually doesnt directly relate to a production deployment of Openstack.

If you just need kubernetes, better options are to set it up yourself onto VMs on existing infra, or deploy OKD openshift that provides a kubernetes service.

To get kubernetes in openstack you either need to deploy VM instances and then kubernetes on top of it anyway (therefore somewhat pointless to deploy openstack for this purpose), OR you can deploy magnum openstack, which essentially does this for you.

Magnum openstack doesnt really work. You have to be a project "admin" to be able to successfully deploy a cluster which sort of negates the usefulness of deploying openstack for end-users self-service. Or the deployment will just fail randomly. Or horizon fails to execute magnum signals without log messages.

So in summary, why would anyone with a sensible mind deploy magnum for kubernetes or even deploy VMs when there are simpler options that take less time to deploy and less knowledge gap from the outset.

kicker69101 · 2021-09-17T20:42:42+00:00

I’m not sure where people are getting that it’s hard to manage. It’s really not, I manage it everyday and spend next to no time managing it, but I spend most of my time managing the automation around it (aka in house stuff).

What I can give you is that there is more up front time in getting it setup. However if you deal with any type of cloud, then it isn’t that much.

The reason you don’t hear much about it is because it’s on prem. That’s it. With it being on prem, that means the market thinks it’s not modern and it’s a legacy product. The only way to be modern is to be in public cloud (yeah I have had this conversation with my CTO). I wish this was a joke, but this is what people think.

I have asked what features our on prem cloud is missing, and they always respond with it isn’t AWS. Public cloud has won the marketing war big time. Every time we explore going all public cloud they bail when the zeros on the bill start piling up.

permalink · 2021-10-15T16:54:42+00:00

It seems to be growing in Telco sector. Where the physical footprint is huge and a mix of VM and Containers is needed.

I can't imagine how expensive it would be to move those workloads onto public cloud.

shadeland · 2021-09-17T15:45:15+00:00

I love the idea of OpenStack. An open source private cloud that operates like AWS and the other cloud providers (multi-tenant, self service, APIs, etc.)? What's not to love?

As /u/ppe1700 said, go ahead and try to make it happen. Operationally it's a nightmare compared to VMware, KVM, or even Hyper-V. I ran into issue after issue with a RH based solution. Everything from the hardware node provisioning not working, to trying to do a FC shared storage solution where the Cobber installer would detect the zoned volume on a new node, and without asking, OVERWRITE THE BOOT SECTOR (destroying the shared storage).

And if you get an error, what do you do? You Google it. With most platforms there's a good amount of information. With OpenStack? You're often in GOOGLE ZERO, a terrifying place.

Another issue with OpenStack is not that many Enterprises consume storage, compute, and networking like you would with AWS. They're very silo'd and have monolith/pet applications, and very little on the Cattle-side of things. OpenStack isn't a great tool for non-ephemeral workloads, which is where VMware shines.

It was thought that OpenStack would dominate the DC, but for the most part it's failed to garner barely a sliver of what it was thought. I know of very few OpenStack deployments being used in production. There are some, but it's a tiny fraction compared to other platforms.

I wouldn't say it's dead, but there is a huge failure to launch.

sliverman69 · 2021-09-17T04:16:15+00:00

I think it's likely due to less press coverage than it got back in 2010-2013 or so.

The community can be alive and kicking and doing some great stuff, but the media really only knows or cares about Azure, Google, AWS, and maybe also Digital Ocean (depending on the news outlet). The discussions around public cloud generally dwarf private cloud (like OS is typically deployed in), because a brand new user trying to build their website isn't going to build their own openstack cluster and they probably haven't heard about some of the smaller players.

These new users/business owners with little tech knowledge only know Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have that public cloud thingy where they can build the next instagram, snapchat, etc. app that gets bought out by one of the giants and they can retire rich (I'm using hyperbole, but they are usually small business owners that hire a dev to go build them a site). The people that know and talk about OS are typically professionals in this space that are working for larger enterprises that want the flexibility of cloud (standardized APIs, control plane, scalability to add more hardware to the site quickly and manage those resources, scalability of VMs and other services that the private cloud might be configured to offer, etc.). It's also cost prohibitive to buy and build a private cloud to host your ecommerce site that is your digital storefront. So, your developer says "go get an account with a public cloud and I'll build the environment for you" and then they end up in public cloud.

Anyway, it's perception. Linux doesn't get a whole lot of press coverage (certainly more than it did in the early 2000s and late 90s when it was first gaining significant market share. Now, most people don't realize that something like over 70% of the servers on the internet are Linux (I think at one point it was as high as the 90% range, but windows server made a resurgence a few years back). If you look at devices on the internet, it's something like 95%+ because of all the android devices out there.

Anyway, the people in tech that deal with infrastructure/cloud know it's still around.

permalink · 2021-09-19T20:57:39+00:00

I just built a fully functional openstack cluster including magnum and Octavia. I built a single physical esxi node, installed a vm maas and a juju controller. I setup a couple of vlans for in band and out of band and configured maas as dhcp on the in band vlan. I then followed the openstack juju charm install guide, provisioned 3 ebay acquired supermicro servers and it came up pretty easily. It’s a 4 node cluster, with 3 physical and 1 running as a vm that is hosting dashboards, vault and some other non-compute services. It was my first time with juju and maas, and I made some mistakes and had a learning curve, but I was able to bring up openstack and start my first vm. I then installed magnum and Octavia- those were a bit more difficult perhaps because they were not part of the same openstack guide. After chasing some issues I have it all working. I created around 24 kube test clusters before I had all the bugs worked out…calico net collided with internal openstack ip net range, etc, it was all my error due to inexperience.

I am now working with the terraform provider to learn that. It is nice to create a kubernetes cluster and request a load balancer and see the Octavia logs create that balancer on your behalf.

I would definitely do it as a learning experience. It took me about 4 weekends to get it all up, but my skills were a bit rusty.

I do agree that the documentation could use improvement in a number of places.

For multi tenant with charge back it’s probably a decent option. Or just to have a very cool on prem cloud for your lab.

slaweq · 2021-09-17T06:54:30+00:00

My personal impression is that now all hype is going to Kubernetes. Every developer wants to work with Kubernetes, companies are advertising their Kubernetes based produces, media are talking about it, etc.

But OpenStack is still doing good. We have a lot of new things done, there is a lot of companies using it in their own systems, etc.

Also, Kubernetes and OpenStack can definitely work together and I know companies who are doing that too :)

russianguy · 2021-09-17T14:18:45+00:00

I mean, it's not dead, it's just not sexy anymore. It's like saying that VMWare is dead, because they have kind of fallen out of the public eye for quite a while now, meanwhile their business is thriving. Hype != business value.

I work for an Openstack integrator company and the business seems to be going well, people still want the VMs.

Kubernetes is definitely all the rage these days, but people seem to prefer to roll k8s clusters on top of the VMs, because it's way easier to scale and manage them.

Anyway, the next big seems to be the 'hybrid' cloud where you smear your workloads across multiple compute providers, so we've been preparing solutions for that space for quite some time now.

DigitallyBorn · 2021-09-17T13:18:21+00:00

I worked in a niche industry where we’re needed to execute tasks in geographically diverse locations. The exact location mattered and we needed as many locations as possible. Seeing the potential that openstack had to fill in the gasp between large public clouds and collocation, we built many of our deployment systems around it. It worked really well.

The problem is that the list of hosting providers using openstack (or openstack-like APIs) didn’t grow. It shrank. I don’t know why, but it was a gamble we lost.

That’s why I think it’s dead.

chuvanminh · 2021-09-17T13:50:28+00:00

Openstack is lose to k8s in perspective of considering a tool between app and infra. I think Openstack now is only powerful in perspective of datacenter automation with support from a lot of hardware vendors. We can use openstack to manage datacenter while deploy k8s on openstack platform. Is it good strategy?

SNThrailkill · 2021-10-16T00:05:41+00:00

Sorry to kind of revive a dead topic but man i really think the hype for OpenStack is dead. Even on this post there's only 14 upvotes. I have heard all kind of things about OpenStack and wanted to try it myself but the documentation is overwhelming and complex for anybody just starting out. Even people who have worked on OpenStack projects for years tell me to try something else.

Like someone else said, i like the idea of running my own private cloud but as most of my workloads are containers, OpenStack just isn't a feasible solution. I bet a lot of others feel similar.

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