HP Makes $1 Billion Bet on Open Cloud

That's not the same as getting the whole thing running of course, but getting to a simple-looking set of instructions is pretty quick.

I recently evaluated ovirt in a small business context, and one of the stumbling blocks was, "how do I specify which VMs should be automatically run at boot time, and how do I control the order in which they boot?" The current answer to that with ovirt is in effect: "Well, we expect you to have a highly-availble bunch of management nodes which will simply remember what the set of currently running VMs ought to be. If that doesn't float your boat, maybe you should use the API and roll your own control system."

From a small business context this basically amounts to: No.

Note that this is not a serious criticism of ovirt. A project has finite resource, there's only so many things they can focus on at one time, I fully expect that things will improve over time, and the stuff that is there installs and runs very smoothly.

SOAP itself was Microsoft's attempt to wrest momentum away from Java, and get people to pay attention to .NET, which modestly succeeded.

It also was a the final turd that broke bullshit mountain's forces: ultimately, developers had to figure out what mattered more to the Web's success: was it tagged data (HTML/XML), and we could preserve this distributed component/object conceptual model? Or was it the combination of URI+HTTP with its uniform interface and hypermedia? The REST debate took a long time (through 2007) to answer that, even though in practice with JSON we just pretend to adopt the full architecture.

I think the next revolution in REST would be if a new media type and associated toolkits/libraries come out that helps people build simpler and evolvable systems than JSON does. There are a variety of experiments out there, but as you imply, it's hard work.

I find it odd that a self-declared cloud architect hasn't used what is easily the largest growing IAAS project, free or commercial.

Firstly, OpenStack is not a thriving open source community in the usual sense. It has succeeded in creating a vendor ecosystem, it has not succeeded in creating a large volume of customer successes. An OpenStack deployment is notoriously hard to get right in practice and hundreds of millions of dollars have been squandered to date on failed projects. In this way it has a lot of similarity to CORBA, which was a vendor love fest far before customer adoption, which took years of failures before the initial successes.

Secondly, you may want to look into how the OMG operated (and still operates), which not as a top-down standards body, it is more of a community facilitation organization. OMG set out RFI/RFPs for set of component/facility/service-level specifications with competition in the form of RFP responses that are voted on by the membership and then consolidated. The OMG would have been much better served by having an open source reference implementation for the various specs (avoiding many of the design flaws and ratholes the OMG ran into).

That said, once the OMG picked a recommendation for an area, customers or vendors tended to use that or implement that, and ignore alternatives. This is not much different from the OpenStack Foundation, which can and will control the direction of the OpenStack software for the (debatable) benefits of its leadership and members. The startup community is risk tolerant enough to just "try something else" that's open source without a support contract, sure, but in my experience most enterprises won't mix and match things that aren't "approved" or "recommended" by the mothership and supported by the likes of EMC, VMware, HP or IBM.

Third, consider the popularity of RedHat Linux. It is a billion dollar company because they are the de facto go-to vendor for a Linux distribution, patch network, and support contract. They curate what packages and kernel patches are included in the distribution, but generally rely on Linus' governance for the kernel and do not deviate strongly from it. If Linus doesn't want it in the main kernel, it's an uphill climb to expect to see it eventually in RHEL.

I expect a similar pattern with OpenStack, with the caveat the governance itself is not user-centered, it is vendor-centered, which is not a good sign.

My post was mostly about the funding and political context that is driving OpenStack momentum, and its similarity to past attempts for vendors to gang up and try to take on the market leader (AWS). The community is all about the vendors, currently. Users are growing, but still the minority. And that's a warning sign, because it may mean the users really just don't care as much as the investors in OpenStack think they will.