"OpenStack Is Hell!" ... Then We Encountered the Big 3
Alfred The Chameleon, the Chief Animal Officer, knows why technicians are no longer angry with OpenStack but still angry with the Big 3.
I know techs prefer to read information and data directly from other techs but being the irrevocable king of the tech cave at The Cloud Provider, I’ve interviewed my loyal subjects and can now let you in on the bumpy road they’ve been on.
And don’t think that they have made nice with OpenStack right away. On the contrary, it was an environment that had been bothering them for a long time. The terminology is different, the philosophy is different, simply changing from one technology to another is always a pain in the neck. But they had no idea what was waiting for them when they had to enter the environment of the Big 3 (global public cloud providers – need I say more?).
I understand it, I know it first hand. When I get a new branch in the terrarium, I have to learn to climb it too and it takes a while to get used to it. But there are branches and branches, just as there are IT environments and more difficult IT environments.
So, when our engineers were swearing at cursing OpenStack and now they are doing the same with the Big 3, is there any difference?
Gotcha
I know that you people very often dance around problems – you go around and around until you finally get to the core. But I won’t take the high road. Because when someone wants to trap you and it’s almost guaranteed that they will, it’s just too much.
Sure, it’s one thing that when you choose a proprietary technology provider – which includes the Big 3 – you’re consciously binding yourself and committing yourself. I understand, there are situations that require certain services and they are locked. This is where my reptilian brain is still catching up.
But where I stop catching up is a situation when you misselect a service and choose another one by mistake. Even the fact that you can choose another service by mistake is weird, but hey, you’re human and you make mistakes. But the fact that such a mistake costs you thousands of crowns instead of tens of dollars makes me cringe. Real bad.
When the guys wanted a 30 GB volume – a simple 30 GB volume – I felt like they were going through a royal decree on a roll the length of toilet paper. Scrolling and scrolling and scrolling across types, locations and speeds. Why not just simply click it? 30 GB volume, there you have it. No. It wasn’t OpenStack.
There is a reason why the OpenStack environment is like a green meadow without traps. It’s a green meadow, it’s hard to hide a trap there, because you build the environment as you are used to from the physical environment. That’s why the technicians eventually became friends with OpenStack. When they got the hang of it, it started jumping as they wished.
Big 3, on the other hand, is a metropolitan downtown, which without detailed knowledge will become a gnawing brownfield. And you don’t even know why (unless you’re a certified genius in the global provider section of the IT multiverse).
Options
That they are unlimited with the Big 3? I dare to exercise my royal veto with a simple sentence, the number of words of which can fit on my foot – where is the private cloud?
It is true that the scope of the list of microservices in global providers is almost incomprehensible – this is also the reason why it took 20 minutes to find the right virtual machine option from the “virtual machine” list.
There is a reason why they are referred to as public cloud providers. But the cloud is much more than shared resources from a single pool – private, hybrid, multi, edge or multi-location. But how can you set up and manage these options when control and settings are not uniform and require a new set of knowledge for each additional approach or technology?
I’m not surprised that there is a growing wave of repatriation when such a problem is simply to prepare a persistent disk. As if there is something strange that we need to keep the data and we need it to survive a reboot or sudden death.
Management
Related to this is a concept that I have observed to be key for technicians. When it is there, they slowly purr with bliss, when it is absent, they are white-hot. It’s about intuitiveness.
A technician must familiarize himself with every environment, OpenStack was no exception. Pie charts show something, graphs show something, the topography of networks has two variants… But gradually, in a short time, they got to the point where it just clicked. The resemblance to the physical world is quite a helper.
But with a global public cloud, this is a nightmare. The selection of options is longer than a list of episodes of The Simpsons, searching for detailed information is like playing Catch the Mole, the billing looks like the background from the Matrix, and the CLI speaks Vogon. And the translator in the form of documentation requires the use of a separate dictionary.
If I don’t know something anymore, I at least need it to be found and understood. I can always tell when I observe one of the technicians if they are looking into the documentation of OpenStack or global providers. In the first case, there is a frown, a phase of intense typing comes, another frown, typing and an expression of surprise. At that moment I know that the mission has been accomplished.
In the second case, frowning and typing are included in the process and a lot of other things that we could not put even in the X-rated version of this article. But you’re a tech guy, tell the chameleon you don’t know what I’m talking about?
Onboarding
I’m not talking about how hard it is to get services, but how hard it is to get in sync with the environment. Logic has been the basis of computer technology since the beginning, and yet it has managed to disappear from many technologies and tools.
A great example is the need to have a certificate and in-depth knowledge of the services so that the technician can even understand the basic functions. Wouldn’t it be better to spend 5 minutes on understanding the terminology and then a few mandays max on understanding the logic of the environment and its philosophy?
When I give our technicians a choice between the option of becoming a certified architect with the view of the necessary regular recertification vs. you’ll learn it once and it’ll keep on working. After ventilating their highly expressive emotions, they choose the second option. They will work with reluctance in the global cloud, now with pleasure in OpenStack.
Chameleon’s Closing Statement
I keep my paws for better activities than typing – that’s what I get my subjects for. And I won’t poke my nose in your choice of infrastructure either. Well, maybe a little.
I found some companies that use OpenStack. You might know some of them – Adobe, Blizzard, CERN or Nike. So judge for yourself if our engineers, me and these big companies are lying when they say that OpenStack is worth it. Try it out.
Challenge accepted?
So try the OpenStack for 14 days. No demo version, the real deal.
