OpenStack Reviews & Product Details

What I value the most at OpenStack is the OpenSource community support that comes up in many ways. Firstly, it easy to find an OpenStack installation designated for platform of your choice (we used RDO for a RedHat installation). Secondly, there is a thriving discussion list were you can easily find help about almost everything. Lastly, there is a wide variety of plugins, thrid part projects that may potentially help meeting your business goals. For instance, we used Sahara to easily deploy Hadoop clusters. Thus, we didn't need to focus at all at cluster provisioning - we used use already existing tools which is great about OpenStack. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I reckon that OpenStack may be a difficult to start with (I'm talking about production ready deployment, not a development one). It's modular architecture is flexible but it may be difficult to find out what is going on. For instance, you have to repeat configuration across components, keep them in sync. Besides, OpenStack touches some advanced technologies such as network or compute virtualization so it requires a vast knowledge to setup and maintain it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

First of all, Openness: It's a free and open source project, if it doesn't contain that awesome feature you wish so much, you have the opportunity to contribute to get it on the project. The community behind it is composed mostly by developers of the hundred cloud companies that support and make use of the project. That means a huge base of users under several vendor's cloud around the world, bringing some reliability to the project. The community cares about avoiding vendor lock-in and thus there are initiatives to assure vendor's openstack cloud compatibility with OpenStack's.

Also, quality assurance (QA) *really* matters in OpenStack. You'll see unit, functional and integration tests, besides a rigorous code review process on every change proposed for every project. Of course it's not bug free, nothing is IMHO but I feel like its community is a huge example of how QA should be done.

It's an abstraction layer to manage all the different services necessary to get a cloud environment up and running, thus you can chose which hypervisor, storage and network kind you want to use (which means that your knowledge on your current infrastructure will be useful using OpenStack as well).

Finally the fast growing ecosystem around it, thanks to the big tent initiative, will provide most of all the services and tooling you may need to deploy or offer a robust cloud environment. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Docs are far from ideal, in quantity and quality, OpenStack is huge and things change way to fast and thus sometimes documentation doesn't help you to explore the latest or best of OpenStack.

To deploy openstack isn't a easy task, every single project has a ton of options, and of course it's hard to keep puppet/chef/ansible/some-other-tool sync'ed with the volume of new features every release. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

OpenStack is truly opensource project and everyone can use it or change whatever he wants.

For developers it means that you always can know what is under the hood.

For companies it means possibility to try OpenStack or use it without expenses on licenses.

OpenStack has modular architecture that allows you to select a set of services that you need or create and integrate your own service (For example your own billing or integration with services of your company).

OpenStack is fast-paced project that evolve continuously, every new release brings new services and new features.

I like the community behind OpenStack. If you want to be OpenStack contributor, it is really easy. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

From my point of view OpenStack is not something easy to use.

It doesn't provide smoothly user experience, very often something doesn't work as expected.

I can say that OpenStack is a framework for creation your own cloud, but it is not ready-to-use cloud platform.

A lot of companies like Mirantis, HPE, Red Hat are trying to sell their own "ready-to-use" distributive of OpenStack.

And I feel that it is a really big problem, because big players are trying to create it's own proprietary version of openstack and don't place all changes back to the community.

Big players wants to get a lot of profit from the project with minimum efforts on improving OpenStack.

Just try it and you will see that usability of OpenStack is really bellow any expectations. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

First of all, since I am a passionate Python developer, I love that there is an open source implementation of cloud services in Python. Openstack encourages open source development and contributions including helping new developers getting on board. They have very detailed documentation, good bug tracking with good filtering options. They even provide an IRC channel so that developers and dev ops can ask questions about installiong an openstack service instance. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Since the OpenStack product is pretty big now (more than four million lines of code), there is a high learning curve in setting up Openstack services whether it is for development or for production Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The main benefit of OpenStack that I like the best is to not be tied to one vendor or another. Being able to switch vendors is very important. The pricing of OpenStack and the open source nature is extremely important as well. It is also wide spread so you can use it at hundreds of companies from small shops to online hosting to media companies.Using OpenOpenStack as a platform Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The architecture is still a little rough and the documentation needs work. One issue is how the setup of MySql and RabbitMQ is not properly clustered for maximum performance and stability. Setting up OpenStack without a commercial vendor is a bit rough and requires trying things a few times. The documentation is definitely lacking. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I think a REST interface for monitoring and controlling my infrastructure. I love software defined networking and the ability to quickly experiment with possible configurations on a large and inter-regional scale. As a developer who's used to working with a separate infrastructure team, self-service is incredibly empowering. It means that I can not only write but deploy and monitor new products and features at any time with zero friction. It makes our team much more agile within the organization.

I also use Terraform (https://www.terraform.io/) - a Hashicorp tool for automating a lot of what I do in Openstack and I love how easy it is to create what I want. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It may be specific to our implementation, but cross-region load balancing as a service seems to require a cascading solution to join the different regions under a parent Openstack. If we could further abstract and unify our different regions that would be great. I also don't love the UI for Horizon but I mostly use the command line anyway.

Openstack's biggest weakness in my mind is its youth - its offerings and features are always playing catch-up with AWS. I will often find a feature I like from AWS is either planned or currently being developed in Openstack. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The community really responds to new feature requests and the platform itself has taken a huge leap forward. If you are familiar with Linux and virtualization technologies OpenStack will be a breeze. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It can be complicated and involve to many modules. Knowing OpenStack is open sourced some features work better than others. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Initially, OpenStack provided some virtual machines, storage, and very basic networking functions. As growing new requirements and functions, it is currently providing a bunch of new services for all kinds of cloud resources such as computing, storage, networking, policy, etc.

Because it is an opensource-based project, evolution and development are very fast and adaptive for new requirements. This is one of the best solution for any IaaS, PaaS, and XaaS systems.

OpenStack communities are very huge and all review processes are very instant. It is very easy to contribute our own code to the upstream. In addition, there are many customizable products based on OpenStack and we can easily deploy and test it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I am still wondering if it is stable or not. Its official release is every 6 months. Even though it is a stable release, there are a bunch of bugs which are sometimes very critical to operate. For the commercial version, it should be released for more stable version.

One of the major problem is deployment. There are a bunch of solution for running OpenStack such as devstack, RDO, ubuntu, Midokura, Mirantis. In my case, I spent most of my time to install OpenStack instead of developing and operating some functions. It should be improved for the future. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

In many ways the community is the best feature of OpenStack. With internal and remote cloud infrastructure solutions becoming more necessary for businesses moving to the cloud, the demand for IaaS providers and in-house cloud professionals is growing rapidly. The OpenStack community allows you to stay at the forefront of what is considered the industry standard for cloud compute technology, operations, infrastructure insights, and requirements. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

With all open source projects, there is a certain level of completion that may or may not exist in certain components. Most components of OpenStack are at a stable enough version to deploy confidently to a large user base, however there are a few (Ironic, for example) which are still heavily under development and not ready for use in the real world. In the same vain of open source projects, OpenStack is not a bugless system. We have encountered bugs with even well developed components. However, the ability to be able to propose patches and fix bugs that we discover in the process is something we actually do enjoy. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like the Neutron Structure, Because of GRE & being deep in tenant based networks and Traffic Isolation.

Neutron drivers & SDN Solutions which creates real world of Cloud Computing. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I dislike Python Lang, with a lot of overheads! Our keystone service fulfill about 80 GB of Memory!

I like python in a large variety of programming platforms, and I am a Python Developer, But I think there is another Lang to do this, Maybe C++ or Go. Not that whom I'm deeper in C++ & Go. ( this sentence means I'm a C++ Developer at first, Then a Python developer )

OpenvSwitch in Neutron, Which is very stupid in managing VLan(s) and tenants

Virtualization against Containerization Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.