The OpenStack Blog Everything in & around OpenStack in written words.

For over a year I’ve been faithfully performing installations of OpenStack, writing up notes and documents on how to do this, understanding how to operate the software and, crucially, reporting any bugs I encountered.  The purpose is to investigate OpenStack as a viable cloud hosting platform.  The problem is that I’ve been faithfully performing installations of OpenStack for over a year, tracking the changes between releases (and tracking the changes within the releases) and although the project was making great progress, from the eyes of a potential end user and business customer – patience was wearing thin in having something that both delivered on its promises and able to be demonstrable to my employers.

A few weeks ago, I posted this to the OpenStack Mailing List

Dear all,
I had my first sleepless night last night after a conversation I had in
work regarding an OpenStack installation.  We are a planning an OpenStack
install but I've failed to demonstrate OpenStack running in our environment
and yet packages are now being tagged up with RC.  As big a supporter as I
am, I'm struggling with the justifications when I have nothing tangible to
show.  The real questions are being posed to me on why we're looking at
OpenStack and not CloudStack or Eucalyptus - they have installations that
we can turn to.  I was hoping Essex would help answer these questions
relatively simply, but the opposite has happened - I am struggling to get
OpenStack Essex working under Ubuntu - 11.10 and 12.04.  There are a few
issues I am hoping the community can address...

You can read the entire thread and responses here http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg08501.html

I was at my wits end and was close to giving up – a year is a long time with a list of scars to show for it.
Within hours though, things began to change.  One by one people responded to my plea.  The response was nothing short of extraordinary.  Individual contributors, core developers, business drivers all came out to help – and most refreshing to me – actually understanding my issues.  Expensive support contracts with 4-hour SLAs from the biggest corporations have yielded less effective resolutions in the same time-frame.  Over the course of the week I’d gone from fundamental failures to ticking off issues daily.  From Keystone issues, to misconfiguration of Nova; From Horizon bugs to simple human error – all it needed was the assurance and guidance that I had encountered bugs, or it was simple misconfiguration.

I had offers of assistance to walk me through installations, sessions on IRC going through specific issues – and what was equally important to me that encompassed my issues was that I received assurances that OpenStack is used and does work.

Over the last few weeks, the progress that has been made leading up to the actual Release Candidates has been nothing short of astonishing.  I tried to put this into words with a follow up to the community:

Dear all,
You might know me from such emails as "Agggh, I can't get this thing to
work and its close to RC status!" and such bugs as "Why is this only
affecting me?" so I thought I'd share my gratitude to everyone that has
come out to help make life a lot less stressful for me.
Over the course of just a week I've gone from despair and frustration to
almost wanting to shout from the rooftops the achievements that have been
made in OpenStack and my own deployments and testing.
Whilst many of you might still be on that rocky road, I can assure you that
there is light at the end of the tunnel.  And it's quite bright too...

My eternal gratitude can be read in full here http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg08859.html.

It is clear my issues stemmed from expectations – both from OpenStack and from Ubuntu.  As an end-user, where this end-user is responsible for driving strategy – OpenStack is a product and not just a group of Python scripts and projects inter-connected.  The installation experience is just as important as the functionality of the software as a whole to ensure adoption in an enterprise environment.  First impressions begin at this crucial stage.  Explaining that you’re pulling down source code patches from GitHub as part of an installation is not something I’d want to sanction or want to do.

Since the Essex RC packages, installation has become a breeze.  Confidence is high and efforts have moved from false starts and attempting to getting the fundamentals running, to planning bare-metal provisioning and specific configuration steps required.

Awesome job everyone, you pulled it out of the bag.