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Comment by ebbv | Hacker News Reader

Having spent a lot of time with OpenStack, CloudStack and a number of other cloud platforms (OnApp, Hexagrid and others) over the past two years I came to a conclusion about OpenStack. It's like a bag of dough. Which is great if you're trying to make bread. But if what you want to make is a sandwich, it's not remotely there.

What I mean by that is, OpenStack seems very immature despite how much effort has gone into it. It's still missing a lot of features that, if you're trying to turn it into a commercial cloud platform, are necessary.

CloudStack, to me, seems more complete. I've been working with it for a couple months now and have been very happy with it. It's what we'll be rolling out to production hopefully later this year.

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> It's still missing a lot of features that, if you're trying to turn it into a commercial cloud platform, are necessary.

Could you elaborate on this a bit?

One big issue is usage records. Last I checked OpenStack didn't have good API calls for collecting usage data for users/VMs. It was one of those things that was being worked on but wasn't really fully baked yet. CloudStack has a great implementation already there and fully functional.

I see. What else caught your eye?

Honestly it's been ~6 months since I was messing with OpenStack so the other issues I ran into are not on the forefront of my mind right now.

But all of them, from my perspective, were a result of OpenStack just not being fully baked and ready to deploy in a production environment. It needed more development on our part in order to get it to where we'd need it to be compared to CloudStack.

It was always a case of missing features / functionality rather than something being broken / crappy, at least.

Thanks for your input.

I guess it depends on what perspective you're looking for. OpenStack sends usage information to an AMQP queue for consumption. This is generally for use by the provider and not the end-user however.

This is how the currently deployed public clouds collect usage data.

Like I said, it doesn't provide nice simple API calls for collecting usage information. You have to collect it yourself (from the queue, using PSHB or something.) Then you have to then make your own interface for your billing system to then request records it is interested in from this collection.

CloudStack providing simple API calls that allow you to request usage for any time period is much nicer. It can interface more directly with a billing system.

It's just one of the examples of OpenStack seeming to be kind of "halfway there", whereas CloudStack is much closer to being ready to go.

The queue of usage events is an API for collecting usage information, but it sounds like it's not as high a layer as you'd like to see.

There is also the (new) Ceilometer project which sounds like it implements what you're looking for:

https://github.com/stackforge/ceilometer

It is new, so it's probably not as mature as other options, but it has had a lot of activity recently.

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