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.\u00a0 The purpose is to investigate OpenStack as a viable cloud hosting platform.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
A few weeks ago, I posted this to the OpenStack Mailing List<\/p>\n
\nDear all,\r\nI had my first sleepless night last night after a conversation I had in\r\nwork regarding an OpenStack installation. We are a planning an OpenStack\r\ninstall but I've failed to demonstrate OpenStack running in our environment\r\nand yet packages are now being tagged up with RC. As big a supporter as I\r\nam, I'm struggling with the justifications when I have nothing tangible to\r\nshow. The real questions are being posed to me on why we're looking at\r\nOpenStack and not CloudStack or Eucalyptus - they have installations that\r\nwe can turn to. I was hoping Essex would help answer these questions\r\nrelatively simply, but the opposite has happened - I am struggling to get\r\nOpenStack Essex working under Ubuntu - 11.10 and 12.04. There are a few\r\nissues I am hoping the community can address...<\/pre>\n<\/blockquote>\nYou can read the entire thread and responses here\u00a0http:\/\/www.mail-archive.com\/openstack@lists.launchpad.net\/msg08501.html<\/a><\/p>\n
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.
\nWithin hours though, things began to change.\u00a0 One by one people responded to my plea.\u00a0 The response was nothing short of extraordinary.\u00a0 Individual contributors, core developers, business drivers all came out to help – and most refreshing to me – actually understanding my issues.\u00a0 Expensive support contracts with 4-hour SLAs from the biggest corporations have yielded less effective resolutions in the same time-frame.\u00a0 Over the course of the week I’d gone from fundamental failures to ticking off issues daily.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\nI 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.<\/p>\n
Over the last few weeks, the progress that has been made leading up to the actual Release Candidates has been nothing short of astonishing.\u00a0 I tried to put this into words with a follow up to the community:<\/p>\n
\nDear all,\r\nYou might know me from such emails as \"Agggh, I can't get this thing to\r\nwork and its close to RC status!\" and such bugs as \"Why is this only\r\naffecting me?\" so I thought I'd share my gratitude to everyone that has\r\ncome out to help make life a lot less stressful for me.\r\nOver the course of just a week I've gone from despair and frustration to\r\nalmost wanting to shout from the rooftops the achievements that have been\r\nmade in OpenStack and my own deployments and testing.\r\nWhilst many of you might still be on that rocky road, I can assure you that\r\nthere is light at the end of the tunnel. And it's quite bright too...<\/pre>\n<\/blockquote>\nMy eternal gratitude can be read in full here\u00a0http:\/\/www.mail-archive.com\/openstack@lists.launchpad.net\/msg08859.html<\/a>.<\/p>\n
It is clear my issues stemmed from expectations – both from OpenStack and from Ubuntu<\/a>.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The installation experience is just as important as the functionality of the software as a whole to ensure adoption in an enterprise environment.\u00a0 First impressions begin at this crucial stage.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Since the Essex RC packages, installation has become a breeze.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Awesome job everyone, you pulled it out of the bag.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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.\u00a0 The purpose is to investigate OpenStack as a viable cloud hosting platform.\u00a0 The problem is that I’ve been faithfully performing installations… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2265"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2265"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2265\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2421,"href":"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2265\/revisions\/2421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}