HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

>It's one of the oldest themes in computers - man, this software is crap - that new software will fix all our problems! Until you find the problems with the new.

Sure, it's a universal theme that people can get disillusioned with the promises of software (or any technology) but I don't think that criticism is relevant to this particular story.

What I read in the article is that a few years ago, their hardware was end-of-life (we can speculate that as end-of-lease, or end-of-maintenance, whatever). It forced them into a big fork-in-the-road type of decision: do we attempt to build out an internal cloud or go with AWS? They decided to invest in their datacenter and do it themselves. It turned out that their internal engineering capability could not match the innovations of AWS. The Guardian isn't hoping for "magic software". Any CIO choosing AWS will know they'll still have "gaps" in functionality. (Netflix's OSS portfolio built on top of AWS with its staggering array of "housekeeping" software is a good example of highlighting those gaps.[0]) Instead, their multi-year "experiment" told them that their home grown team could not keep up with AWS.[1]

This doesn't seem so strange since very few companies could hire and maintain the IT competencies to match AWS features even with OpenStack as a foundation. Facebook Inc and Google Inc have the hard core staff to innovate on their proprietary cloud stacks but The Guardian is a newspaper and not a technology firm.

Maybe a lesson here is that OpenStack requires a commitment to supplemental software engineering that's beyond the reach of non-tech companies that treat IT as a "cost center". WalMart could be one of the few non-tech companies that would be able to innovate on top of OpenStack.[2]

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2kKmMyqTfc&feature=youtu.be...

https://netflix.github.io/

[1]from article: “We didn't manage to deliver self-service, we didn't manage to deliver decent load-balancing or autoscaling and actually all the benefits we get from AWS we simply did not get inside of the cloud that we were building internally,” he continued.

[2]http://www.infoworld.com/article/2890873/cloud-computing/wal...

Adrian Cockcroft gave a much better overview of their open source projects here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2kKmMyqTfc

It's two hours long but the first hour is sufficient to get an overview of their open source projects.

⬐ mxpxrocks10

Good call. Thanks for posting. We'll add this to the comments of the original article.

⬐ mxpxrocks10

faizshah - posted (and gave you credit) on the original ScaleScale post. Thanks. BinaryRage - The link is there to netflix.github.io on the original post.

⬐ BinaryRage

You might want to link to the OSS site too - https://netflix.github.io/