Stung by Azure and AWS cost shock? Penny-pinchers love them some OpenStack

The cost and expense of AWS and Azure is helping drive cloud hopefuls to OpenStack, the organisation has said. Jonathan Bryce, OpenStack executive director, told El Reg ahead of this week's conference in Barcelona: "The number-one business driver for open-source cloud is cost." According to Bryce, organisations are using …

[Nate Amsden]

eh

In which market does netapp and cisco compete in?

[TheVogon]

Re: eh

> In which market does netapp and cisco compete in?

Storage? See the Invicta range for instance.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Barcelona: "The number-one business driver for open-source cloud is cost.""

But OpenStack requires an army of scripters and coders to build, automate and maintain it. The whole problem with it is it is so Unixy (e.g. dated approaches like having to edit text files!) that it's only really scalable for massive organisations running really large virtualisation operations where you can afford that overhead. For everyone else Hyper-V or VMware have a lower TCO...Hence hardly anyone not a carrier or hoster uses OpenStack...

[gudguy1a]

People...

Good point you make here, if organizations are not spending the money on a cloud provider, then they're spending it on staff (and on-prem equipment) to do that coding/scripting...

And with adding more staff to do that coding comes costs - salaries, medical/dental insurance, 401k (Roth, etc.) and other stingily granted concessions to keep and (or try to) make employees happy (overtime, sick time/vacation, maternity leave, etc.).

Let's not forget continual upgrades/patches (and testing of those patches) while we're at it...

Oh yeah, and Disaster Recovery - anyone plan and set up DR from scratch to a different city (not for a Hot site but for a Cold or Warm site)...?

Don't forget about power and cooling of the datacenter (as well as power and cooling AND heating for the humans).

Then there is the space needed to house more staff.

And then there is, well, we could go nattering on about this, couldn't we...?

The cost of operating in the cloud, for now, is going to cost the organization to some degree. The issue will be in deciding which way to go:

a) hiring more coders and buying equipment or

b) offload most of the h/w (& maybe software) worries to a provider and THEN bring in a platoon of coders rather than an army

[friedmania]

Re: People...

I have often wondered what the "real truth" is on costs between public cloud and on-prem DIY style with Openstack. Unless your size can justify the hiring of the skillsets required to manage Openstack, you may end up paying a vendor to manage your Openstack environment anyway, and perhaps get used to their "value add-ons" that get you locked-in to some degree.

[mpeters1]

Cost Threshold analysis

Ran across this article earlier today reviewing the analysis from 451 Research comparing private OpenStack vs. private VMware/Hyper-V vs. public cloud. Seems to benefit only when above the 400 VMs per engineer mark.

http://blog.calsoftinc.com/industry_insights/openstack-commercial-private-clouds-can-beat-public-cloud-cost-451-research?utm_source=SocialMedia&utm_medium=LDNFBTW