[nl]

Why? Serious question.

OpenStack's model seems to be "clone what Amazon does, 18 months later then hand over to vendors who don't have the scale to match Amazon's prices"

It's kind of nice in theory for internal clouds.

But I'm increasingly seeing tooling targeting Docker instead of OpenStack at the service level for doing the same kinds of things OpenStack is supposed to offer (ie, the service utilities Docker to offer automatic deployment/availability/loadbalancing instead of doing it using the OpenStack APIs).

At the cloud vendor layer, the differences between vendors can be abstracted using libraries, which removes an alleged attraction of OpenStack.

Given that, I see a few vendors challenging Amazon by building unique selling points (Google has some innovative things as does Microsoft, and Digital Ocean pushes the price/performance thing).

I see Docker taking away a lot of the "cross cloud deployment" attraction that OpenStack had, and doing it better.

So what does OpenStack offer end users? (I understand it's attractions to vendors, and maybe the internal cloud use case).

[Thaxll]

Because renting bare metal servers and put your cloud on it is cheaper and better in a lot of cases.

[nl]

When you are actually using it as a private cloud for multiple internal clients I can kind of see the point (as I mentioned in my previous comment).

If not, then what utility is OpenStack providing?

Bare metal works well. I see many people using either Docker on bare metal or maybe a VM layer as an additional security layer, but using Docker as the deployment target.

[vidarh]

The utility it is providing is deployment/management of the underlying resources. Docker does not do that. Some of the stuff people are building on top of/around Docker will provide it, but it's not there.

But I agree with you that OpenStack is not good enough to be worth it for that with perhaps the exception of very large multi-tenant deployments (in which case, my first goal would be to start rewriting large chunks of it). And parts of it are just so horribly over-engineered it is scary, because it makes me wonder what it is they're missing to think it was necessary to make things that convoluted, and what they're missing because they've made it so convoluted.

[zzzeek]

> And parts of it are just so horribly over-engineered it is scary, because it makes me wonder what it is they're missing to think it was necessary to make things that convoluted, and what they're missing because they've made it so convoluted.

So the source code for Amazon Web Services is clearly architected, free of cruft and under-/over-engineering? I assume you've worked with AWS's source code in order to be able to make such a comparison. In my experience, the design and architecture of closed-source internal applications delivered to customers only as a front-end is usually a nightmare.

[nl]

I mildly degree with your assertion that the Docker tools aren't there yet. Some are pretty usable, and additionally if you include the category of DevOps tools then they are pretty good.

I agree entirely with you on the rest of your comment.

[otterley]

Maybe -- the additional labor overhead needed to maintain OpenStack might negate the cost savings of running your own equipment.