OpenStack abandons AWS challenge dreams, makes eyes at telcos

OpenStack, once seen as the open alternative to Amazon’s AWS, is positioning itself as virtualized telecoms middleware. The open-source project has rolled out a white paper championing Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) with backing from the big dogs of telecoms. The report calls on developers to get involved with and help …

[Nate Amsden]

i don't see it

I don't see anything in the article that says they are abandoning anything. HP seemed very committed to supporting Openstack in Helion private clouds, the public cloud was always a question.

Obviously there are tons of largish companies out there working on deploying Openstack internally. I think it makes the most sense for the biggest players, companies that have server counts in the thousands for example.

What I do see in the article is OpenStack touting one successful use case for their platform.

I've never used OpenStack myself, looks interesting, but more complicated than I care to deal with myself. (I use vmware instead, and am not using any of their fancy vCloud stuff, just the basics ESXi enterprise plus with vcenter).

[Anonymous Coward]

This article is mixing a few things up. OpenStack was never a public cloud (or AWS) alternative. Some companies like HP and Rackspace tried to leverage it that way but it's simply cloud. The telcos have been leveraging OpenStack as a private cloud for awhile (as have Disney, Walmart, etc). NFV is additive to OpenStack, not a pivot. The whole context for this article is just wrong and poorly researched.

[Naselus]

"The whole context for this article is just wrong and poorly researched."

That's perfectly normal for a Gavin Clarke article, unfortunately. As is the apparent unfamiliarity with the concept of paragraphs, instead presenting it as a set of single- or double-sentence bullet points. You can't help but wonder if he's copied the whole article off someone else's Power Point slides, from a presentation on a completely different topic.

Gavin's done a few decent articles regarding businesses, acquisitions and mergers, but clearly doesn't really understand much about the actual tech and so isn't much use where it's concerned.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, NFV is just another use case of OpenStack. There are many other use cases like application containers, hardware provisioning, object storage, Platform-as-a-Service, etc. It's fine to pick one and ignore the rest.

As for Amazon AWS, yes it's true they offer specialized services that are not available currently on OpenStack but most customers do not need these and can solve it in o

ther ways, for example the integrated MySQL database backend AWS offers. One could instead run a cluster of containers with clustred and loadbalanced MySQL or ProstgreSQL to do the same (and probably cheaper than the AWS service too).

I can count up to more than 50 different public cloud operators globaly running OpenStack. They may not be the size of AWS, GCE or Azure, but they exist and they offer the same services. Often for a better price for computing and network usage.

[matt_j]

Lazy journalism

This article really is total nonsense written by someone who clearly has no idea of the OpenStack landscape. There are OpenStack public cloud providers in every European country, and the private cloud OpenStack market is growing insanely right now in a wide range of sectors including academia, media, telco's, financial services and retail. Telco's and the NFV crowd have been involved in OpenStack since right from the start, and the NFV group continues to be one of many important user groups in the community.

[Anonymous Coward]

@Nate, you can try to deploy OpenStack with Fuel. It's quite easy actually.