Open Stack

We're in agreement. What little entry there might be in a system of such
a small size would be entirely manageable by a single administrator...

I care about that deployment, deeply, as that is how things like OpenStack
take root in IT departments.. with somebody playing around. However, what
I care more about is that when that deployment goes from POC to reality,
it can scale up to tens of admins and thousands of machines. If it cannot,
if the user finds themselves doing things manually and handling problems
by poking packages out to small classes of machines, then we have failed
and OpenStack will be very costly for any org to scale out.

Excerpts from Fox, Kevin M's message of 2014-01-08 09:22:15 -0800:
> Let me give you a more concrete example, since you still think one size fits all here.
> 
> I am using OpenStack on my home server now. In the past, I had one machine with lots of services on it. At times, I would update one service and during the update process, a different service would break.
> 
> Last round of hardware purchasing got me an 8 core desktop processor with 16 gigs of ram. Enough to give every service I have its own processor and 2 gigs of ram. So, I decided to run OpenStack on the server to manage the service vm's.
> 
> The base server  shares out my shared data with nfs, the vm's then re-export it in various ways like samba, dlna to my ps3, etc.
> 
> Now, I could create a golden image for each service type with everything all setup and good to go. And infrastructure to constantly build updated ones.
> 
> But in this case, grabbing Fedora cloud image or Ubuntu cloud image, and starting up the service with heat and a couple of line cloud init telling it to install just the package for the one service I need saves a ton of effort and space. The complexity is totally on the distro folks and not me. Very simple to maintain.
> 
> I can get almost the stability of the golden image simply by pausing the working service vm, spawning a new one, and only if its sane, switch to it and delete the old. In fact, Heat is working towards (if not already done) having Heat itself do this process for you.
> 
> I'm all for golden images as a tool. We use them a lot. Like all tools though, there isn't one "works for all cases best" tool.
> 
> I hope this use case helps.
> 
> Thanks,
> Kevin