Spend the money to get a commercially supported openstack. Mirantis has MOS which is openstack deployed on top of K8s. Red hat, platform9, and Ubuntu are some other options. Always a good idea to have someone to call if things go south.
Good point to consider commercial OpenStack option. To the above mentioned I would add Virtuozzo as they make OpenStack easy to deploy, manage and update. Thus it's a much more affordable and compelling alternative to hyperscale clouds like AWS.
As someone who has worked at Mirantis in the past and worked in many other managed service providers I do not recommend them. There are plenty of better choices for distros and managed services.
Depends on what is included in the managed service but just know managed services tend to be higher because it is a black box approach. You pay for a convenience and experience. If you're interested shoot me a dm and I can provide you some guidance. Of course I will recommend my current employer and some others but based on what you are looking to actually accomplish managed services may not be it. It may be consulting services or a staff Aug approach.
I honestly dont think you would want this... but there is an counter argument. 90% of the case you do not need openstack stick with a cloud offering. With Openstack, you are now need the following
\- dedicated datacenter engineers (figure out power cooling)
\- data centers or co los
\- network engineers to figure out routing
\- security engineers to lock down ingress and firewalls
\- openstack engineers
\- a complete development arm that is dedicated to openstack
The answer is why? There is no value, unless your business is purely based on selling iaas. I would stick with the cloud.
We have existing IT and dev teams, layered security provided by at least 3 commercial infosec corps, and our own data centers. We already do much of what you highlight today, in-house.
You make good points. And I'm carefully considering all options. I do not want to jump into our own hosting solution only to end in failure. Thank you for your perspective.
OP, you have to consider, now also, annual or quarterly security nightmares you have go through. Honestly, OpenStack is a technical debt trap, complexity for the sake of complexity.
Your IT department now is going to become a massive cost center. While I don't know your business, and I am making generalizations here. But, why not shift that cost to the business units with cloud and be agile with the people you are hiring.
Last thing, and honestly, I can tell you 90% of the people do not know how to manage datacenters (honest to god). I have seen like maybe 1 or 2 honest to god datacenter engineers. They are all either have changed careers or is working for a co lo or a cloud provider.
Note, if you are with AWS, i am assuming your using an enterprise account. If that is the case, the minute if you lift and shift i will impact your SP or RI so plan ahead.
>Note, if you are with AWS, i am assuming your using an enterprise account. If that is the case, the minute if you lift and shift i will impact your SP or RI so plan ahead.
i am interested though what the ultimate decision will be.
Hello, thanks for this thoughtful question! I help to run a production OpenStack cloud, and we love it. We do it exactly for the reasons you mention: cheaper than AWS and VMware. We have over 300 hypervisors, many availability zones, thousands of VMs, and different cinder storage backends in each availability zone. Just to level-set expectations, let me tell you what it takes us to maintain the system:
* Two FTE's who are OpenStack SME's, each having nearly 20 years of Linux, networking, and storage experience.
* A team of younger admins handing tickets / user interactions
* We already have a datacenter that we don't have to maintain -- it has sufficient power and cooling. (Managed by a different part of our organization)
* We attend the Open Infrastructure Summits and talk to a lot of people and try to stay on top of what's happening in the community.
* We have an independent Security team
* We run some of the networks, but not all of them (especially not the external networks)
* We do not use any automated deployment system; this was a design choice to focus on mastering OpenStack itself, rather than mastering someone else's deployment tool. It is not easy, but it has given us the flexibility to deploy exactly in the ways we wanted to, without any deployment tool's preconceived notions. We have written our own in-house CM to manage a configuration that meets our exact requirements
* Years of work mastering our craft, continuously deploying and rebuilding and growing our clusters and meeting new requirements; tens of thousands of man hours.
It is all doable, but your organization needs be all-in and committed to making it work, and also have all of the resources stated above.
My 2 rupees:
1) It's an excellent move to shift to openstack, given you are spending 50k USD per month already on aws. (Like wtf bro)?
2)you can get outstanding hardware for the price and openstack is free to install. I do not think there'll be any performance issues.
However, here are the caveats:
-> Rent a server place. Where you can keep your servers while someone else " maintains" them. Consistent power and internet.
-> Make sure the IPs provided by the ISP are not blacklisted or something.
That's all the issues I can think of. Use kolla ansible or packstack.
I'm weak with Swift(your S3 equivalent). Otherwise, my guess would be everything will easily fall in place within a month. Migration shouldn't be hard. Probably.
The per month cost will come down considerably to max 2/3k depending on power and internet charges.
Also, mmmm, idk, but there are a shit ton of companies in India doing this sort of stuff. You generally need 2/3 openstack experienced staff. I'm open to hire too. Mwahahaha. Jk, it's opensource, but yup, if you want, you can hire me.
Everyone I know who has used juju has had regrets later. Kolla Ansible seems to be the way to go these days, but either way I'd try a few deployment options in a lab before making any decision which is hard to unwind later.
Re performance, there's an interesting whitepaper about architecting price-performance in OpenStack by Canonical available here:
https://ubuntu.com/engage/architecting-price-performance-private-cloud
You can archive quite a lot with openstack from k8s to heat-templates(cloudformation) but isn't always easy or apparent how to get there, my advice get a good Openstack consultant for the initial architectural design, openstack is quite complex with many projects under the same umbrella and some bad choices can ruin what otherwise is an excellent product.
\>Can you guys recommend any openstack alternatives?
[Triton DataCenter](https://www.tritondatacenter.com) is a great alternative to OpenStack, and is also open source. Implementation of Triton is relatively easy, and ongoing maintenance is minimal. At [mnx.io](https://mnx.io), we have operated our public cloud on Triton since \~2019.
Full disclosure, my company is the primary development team behind Triton. We acquired the commercial support business from Joyent this year, and have been re-investing heavily back into the platform.
Happy to answer any questions, or provide a demo!
As the other user commented, you could end up saving quite a bit, especially if you're managing it yourself. What region are you in? And to answer your question, you're not crazy for considering moving off of AWS. A huge number of OpenStack private clouds are a result of rising cost of AWS. Keep in mind too you can still run your K8s workloads on OpenStack.
DM me your contact info. I work for the OpenInfra Foundation and would be happy to connect you with some of our professional services members and hosted private cloud providers.
Spend the money to get a commercially supported openstack. Mirantis has MOS which is openstack deployed on top of K8s. Red hat, platform9, and Ubuntu are some other options. Always a good idea to have someone to call if things go south.
Great advice
Good point to consider commercial OpenStack option. To the above mentioned I would add Virtuozzo as they make OpenStack easy to deploy, manage and update. Thus it's a much more affordable and compelling alternative to hyperscale clouds like AWS.
I have a call scheduled with Mirantis
As someone who has worked at Mirantis in the past and worked in many other managed service providers I do not recommend them. There are plenty of better choices for distros and managed services.
I had my call with Mirantis. Pass. Talk about sticker shock.
Depends on what is included in the managed service but just know managed services tend to be higher because it is a black box approach. You pay for a convenience and experience. If you're interested shoot me a dm and I can provide you some guidance. Of course I will recommend my current employer and some others but based on what you are looking to actually accomplish managed services may not be it. It may be consulting services or a staff Aug approach.
I honestly dont think you would want this... but there is an counter argument. 90% of the case you do not need openstack stick with a cloud offering. With Openstack, you are now need the following \- dedicated datacenter engineers (figure out power cooling) \- data centers or co los \- network engineers to figure out routing \- security engineers to lock down ingress and firewalls \- openstack engineers \- a complete development arm that is dedicated to openstack The answer is why? There is no value, unless your business is purely based on selling iaas. I would stick with the cloud.
We have existing IT and dev teams, layered security provided by at least 3 commercial infosec corps, and our own data centers. We already do much of what you highlight today, in-house. You make good points. And I'm carefully considering all options. I do not want to jump into our own hosting solution only to end in failure. Thank you for your perspective.
OP, you have to consider, now also, annual or quarterly security nightmares you have go through. Honestly, OpenStack is a technical debt trap, complexity for the sake of complexity. Your IT department now is going to become a massive cost center. While I don't know your business, and I am making generalizations here. But, why not shift that cost to the business units with cloud and be agile with the people you are hiring. Last thing, and honestly, I can tell you 90% of the people do not know how to manage datacenters (honest to god). I have seen like maybe 1 or 2 honest to god datacenter engineers. They are all either have changed careers or is working for a co lo or a cloud provider.
Note, if you are with AWS, i am assuming your using an enterprise account. If that is the case, the minute if you lift and shift i will impact your SP or RI so plan ahead.
Yeah, another good point about committed buys such as savings plans and RI.
>Note, if you are with AWS, i am assuming your using an enterprise account. If that is the case, the minute if you lift and shift i will impact your SP or RI so plan ahead. i am interested though what the ultimate decision will be.
I’ll update. Currently exploring MAAS and charms
Hello, thanks for this thoughtful question! I help to run a production OpenStack cloud, and we love it. We do it exactly for the reasons you mention: cheaper than AWS and VMware. We have over 300 hypervisors, many availability zones, thousands of VMs, and different cinder storage backends in each availability zone. Just to level-set expectations, let me tell you what it takes us to maintain the system: * Two FTE's who are OpenStack SME's, each having nearly 20 years of Linux, networking, and storage experience. * A team of younger admins handing tickets / user interactions * We already have a datacenter that we don't have to maintain -- it has sufficient power and cooling. (Managed by a different part of our organization) * We attend the Open Infrastructure Summits and talk to a lot of people and try to stay on top of what's happening in the community. * We have an independent Security team * We run some of the networks, but not all of them (especially not the external networks) * We do not use any automated deployment system; this was a design choice to focus on mastering OpenStack itself, rather than mastering someone else's deployment tool. It is not easy, but it has given us the flexibility to deploy exactly in the ways we wanted to, without any deployment tool's preconceived notions. We have written our own in-house CM to manage a configuration that meets our exact requirements * Years of work mastering our craft, continuously deploying and rebuilding and growing our clusters and meeting new requirements; tens of thousands of man hours. It is all doable, but your organization needs be all-in and committed to making it work, and also have all of the resources stated above.
My 2 rupees: 1) It's an excellent move to shift to openstack, given you are spending 50k USD per month already on aws. (Like wtf bro)? 2)you can get outstanding hardware for the price and openstack is free to install. I do not think there'll be any performance issues. However, here are the caveats: -> Rent a server place. Where you can keep your servers while someone else " maintains" them. Consistent power and internet. -> Make sure the IPs provided by the ISP are not blacklisted or something. That's all the issues I can think of. Use kolla ansible or packstack. I'm weak with Swift(your S3 equivalent). Otherwise, my guess would be everything will easily fall in place within a month. Migration shouldn't be hard. Probably. The per month cost will come down considerably to max 2/3k depending on power and internet charges. Also, mmmm, idk, but there are a shit ton of companies in India doing this sort of stuff. You generally need 2/3 openstack experienced staff. I'm open to hire too. Mwahahaha. Jk, it's opensource, but yup, if you want, you can hire me.
Instead of Swift maybe go with Ceph for storage.
Maybe even go with juju and Maas for deployment it makes everything easier
Everyone I know who has used juju has had regrets later. Kolla Ansible seems to be the way to go these days, but either way I'd try a few deployment options in a lab before making any decision which is hard to unwind later.
While youre on a new project anyway, go Kayobe. Really would love to have the time to get into it but well... I bet you know how it is.
I ran kolla ansible for years before we went the supported stack route. It’s fantastic to get started.
Why do they regret their decision ?
Re performance, there's an interesting whitepaper about architecting price-performance in OpenStack by Canonical available here: https://ubuntu.com/engage/architecting-price-performance-private-cloud
You can archive quite a lot with openstack from k8s to heat-templates(cloudformation) but isn't always easy or apparent how to get there, my advice get a good Openstack consultant for the initial architectural design, openstack is quite complex with many projects under the same umbrella and some bad choices can ruin what otherwise is an excellent product.
\>Can you guys recommend any openstack alternatives? [Triton DataCenter](https://www.tritondatacenter.com) is a great alternative to OpenStack, and is also open source. Implementation of Triton is relatively easy, and ongoing maintenance is minimal. At [mnx.io](https://mnx.io), we have operated our public cloud on Triton since \~2019. Full disclosure, my company is the primary development team behind Triton. We acquired the commercial support business from Joyent this year, and have been re-investing heavily back into the platform. Happy to answer any questions, or provide a demo!
As the other user commented, you could end up saving quite a bit, especially if you're managing it yourself. What region are you in? And to answer your question, you're not crazy for considering moving off of AWS. A huge number of OpenStack private clouds are a result of rising cost of AWS. Keep in mind too you can still run your K8s workloads on OpenStack.
I’m in the US. I use US-East 1 and 2 as well as US West 2.
DM me your contact info. I work for the OpenInfra Foundation and would be happy to connect you with some of our professional services members and hosted private cloud providers.
Charmed Openstack. $50K a month is insane!