Open Stack

> On 2017. Apr 16., at 3:03, Neil Jerram <neil at tigera.io> wrote:
> 
> FWIW, I think the Lego analogy is not actually helpful for another reason: it has vastly too many ways of combining, and (hence) no sense at all of consistency / interoperability between the different things that you can construct with it. Whereas for OpenStack I believe you are also aiming for some forms of consistency and interoperability. 

I see your point here and without being too biased by the Lego analogy I don’t fully agree.

On one hand, in my view we can go deep and associate to the new style Legos where you can build more realistic things and you have more specific pieces and not just the plain colored rectangular ones and can explore all the ways of putting them together, but I don’t think we want to do that when we are looking for some kind of an analogy to help people digest a new concept. We will not find anything that will be perfect, I think we only need a good enough one let that be Legos or something else.

On the other hand despite of the many ways to combine the Lego blocks you will still find matching things, like the ability of attaching the Lego figures for instance. In this sense I think we need to find the right level of consistency/interoperability here. Like for instance the characteristics and requirements of an HPC and a Telecom cloud are different and I don’t think there are many use cases to ever connect these two types of clouds or migrate workload between them, but there’s still a subset of functionality that both areas expect from their OpenStack based cloud, which are really the basics and not every small detail.

What the Lego analogy describes well is the consistency between the building blocks, which is a really important message in my opinion.

With that being said, if we can find a better one or decide not to use any analogies that also works for me. I don't think we should spend overly too much time with this, although if we can find a good enough one, I’m in favor to use it as it sometimes makes it much easier to get to know and accept a new(-ish) concept.

Thanks,
Ildikó