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Comment by rahen | Hacker News Reader

OpenStack isn’t a competitor to VMware but to AWS and GCP. It enables you to create a fully API-driven data center that includes elastic compute, elastic network, and elastic storage resources. The key difference is that, unlike a public cloud where you consume APIs (OPEX), with OpenStack, you own and manage them (CAPEX).

OpenStack is not ideal for provisioning static workloads like you would with vCenter. It works best as an orchestrator for elastic, API-driven workloads. It also simplifies hybrid cloud integration: link your SDN networks, then use Heat to manage deployments based on predefined rules and affinities.

Companies looking for an open-source vCenter for static, single-tenant provisioning should look for ProxMox, it will meet their needs a lot better.

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> OpenStack isn’t a competitor to VMware but to AWS and GCP.

It's a competitor for all three. Having a "fully API-driven data center" is just as useful on your own hardware as it is using someone else's hardware.

VMware recognizes this as they have OpenStack APIs:

* https://www.vmware.com/topics/openstack-api

> Companies looking for an open-source vCenter for static, single-tenant provisioning should look for ProxMox, it will meet their needs a lot better.

Or XCP-ng.

I don't follow the difference between static and elastic workloads. OpenStack can create a VM just like VMware, and has more features that would otherwise be implemented as a K8s cluster running on VMs.

In a cloud environment like OpenStack, virtual machines are a means to provide compute resources, not an end goal like in VMware.

Elastic workloads typically scale horizontally, unlike the vertical scaling or static provisioning seen in environments such as VMware. Elastic workloads are usually stateless, declaratively provisioned, have short uptimes, and are designed to fail gracefully rather than relying on high availability.

Kubernetes (K8S) can achieve similar capabilities, but is still distinct from what OpenStack offers: an open-source, private AWS providing multi-tenant, API-driven infrastructure for storage, networking, and compute.

If you don't care about working with elastic APIs, OpenStack/AWS is probably not for you, use VMware/ProxMox + Kubernetes.

Thank you!

Yes, they are moving to OpenShift, which is comparable to ProxMox. (Not OpenStack)

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