[safeharbourio]

they chose to make their own stack afew years ago instead of going with the already available and business friendly openstack, going by the same reasoning and the long amount of time they took to reach here, it highly likely to be a custom thing.

[pinewurst]

If OpenStack is "business-friendly" then it's very particular about who its friends are.

[raiyu]

We started writing code for DO in the summer of 2011, we evaluated OpenStack at the time but felt there were four major problems.

1 - First was that it didn't really work. You could stand it up but DHCP licenses would fail, your VMs would go down, it just wasn't quite stable.

2 - Naively we thought it was a bit too complicated. Sometimes early on being naive is great and we certainly made a more simple system ourselves, however as time went on we realized, that our backend was beginning to resemble OpenStack in complexity, but we would still have more flexibility in hiding that complexity from our end users.

3 - OpenStack is designed for organizations but not necessarily to be multi-tenant. Taking any software and making it multi-tenant for different customers is a large effort, so coupling that with OpenStack not being mature, just seemed like a lot of effort to put into it.

4 - It wasn't really Open Source the way we were used to it. We were used to organic open source efforts by single developers or teams of developers that naturally grew and developed over time. OpenStack just looked like it was very much "corporate" sponsored open source, which wasn't something we felt comfortable putting our faith into.

[zuzzurro]

Can you expand?

[pinewurst]

My comment was a play on an old joke about Unix. My personal experience with OpenStack is that it's a moving target, complex and unstable, a combination of over- and under- engineering. The two large corporations that I know using it have required almost superhuman effort to keep their OpenStack environments up and running.