Cloudscaling - Latest Comments

Re: Simplicity Scales: An Alternative Approach to OpenStack Nova RPC Messaging

Kiril Karaatanasov — Mon, 14 May 2012 10:48:14 -0000

This is very very cool. I was thinking how to decentralize messaging for a while. the problem with 0MQ I saw is that in order to accommodate configuration changes one would end up with creating a "broker" concept. Your idea of pushing out the configuration problem to outside the messaging and using zookeeper or other appropriate technology seems great!

Thanks!

Re: Simplicity Scales: An Alternative Approach to OpenStack Nova RPC Messaging

randybias — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 13:16:02 -0000

We are fixing.

Re: Simplicity Scales: An Alternative Approach to OpenStack Nova RPC Messaging

Guest — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 12:24:10 -0000

There is a map, and a number of photos and screenshots that are likely incompatible with the licensing. I'd recommend no explicit licensing on works unless it is truly all your work.

Re: Simplicity Scales: An Alternative Approach to OpenStack Nova RPC Messaging

randybias — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 19:06:36 -0000

Please give an example. It's not on the code slides.

Re: Simplicity Scales: An Alternative Approach to OpenStack Nova RPC Messaging

Guest — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 18:46:10 -0000

The CC license on the presentation is likely incompatible with some of the content.

Re: An Appliance Does Not Make Your Software Architecture AWS Compatible

randybias — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 18:43:36 -0000

Thanks Chiradeep. We are committed to OpenStack write now. Maybe in another role.

Re: An Appliance Does Not Make Your Software Architecture AWS Compatible

chiradeep — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 14:31:48 -0000

Heh, I am not the Citrix Chief Cloud Architect (that title does not exist). Also, my tweets are my own and not Citrix's. I am mostly a code monkey very interested in delivering solutions that work for customers. Regarding Netscaler, it isn't that hard to orchestrate virtual appliances in CloudStack. In fact, I wrote the EIP and ELB features using virtual appliances (http://goo.gl/qU5dl) last year, but we didn't merge it in since customers wanted Netscaler. You can just as easily write an adapter to use F5 BigIP instead of Netscaler. Writing new networking features in CloudStack is easy -- clean abstractions, well defined integration points and fantastic extensibility. You should try it some time.

Re: An Appliance Does Not Make Your Software Architecture AWS Compatible

Pete Downing — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 13:45:30 -0000

Randy,

Appreciate your insight! I think your dead-on with your call for Citrix to counter claim... seems like a sensible idea.

Interestingtake from Citrix's blog:

“It’sAll About Open”:
http://blogs.citrix.com/2012/0...

What is interesting here is they claim they will still contribute to
OpenStack. Where I am going with this and to your theme on marketing... Net result here, Citrix has seemingly failed to execute on announcements of
the same caliber… see these blog posts concerning OpenStack just over a year ago:
http://blogs.citrix.com/2011/0...
http://blogs.citrix.com/2011/0...
http://blogs.citrix.com/2010/0...
http://blogs.citrix.com/2010/0...

Oh yeah and here is the official PR announcement:
http://www.citrix.com/English/...

Net, net… Citrix is good at announcing things! I want Citrix to be successful here and know they can be. But to your point... would love to see a well thought out counter claim.

On your GigaOm blog, I asked another question as well...

To me, it seems to me you’d want to hold a “friend” like Citrix closer, why the sudden shift? I mean I know you guys [CloudScaling] have a shifted in strategy but wouldn't you want to spend time targeting guys like Piston Computing, Nimbula, Nebula and Morph Labs who are your primary competition in the OpenStack space? If I recall, Cloud.com plus CloudScaling was a pretty powerful combination! Why not Citrix and CloudScaling? If I was CloudScaling, I would counter their claim of not backing off supporting OpenStack (as stated in the blog post above) to see where they are really going in regards to OpenStack. CRN seems to think they are abandoning OpenStack:
http://www.crn.com/news/cloud/...

Again, the above referenced blog says otherwise... Your take aside from your other blog on this topic ("Citrix Joins Apache and Contributes CloudStack: Bold Move or Brash Decision?")?

Thanks!
Pete

Disclaimer: I used to be an employee of Citrix Systems and I am now an employee of BMC Software. Anything I write is my own words and opinions and does not represent any company I am currently employed by.

Re: An Appliance Does Not Make Your Software Architecture AWS Compatible

randybias — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 13:05:15 -0000

Pete,

Thanks for the very thoughtful comment. I agree with most of your thinking here. I think where it falls down is when I look at the general responses I have seen. Just now I had yet another person tell me they thought the posting was right on and in their experience with CloudStack highly accurate, particularly the issues with the router VMs. The positive responses so far are much higher than the negative responses by at least 20:1. I think many folks view my article less as an article and more as some counter-claims.

I think it's worth looking at this for what it is: claim vs. counter-claim. I don't see that as an attack. Yes, it's marketing, but the reality is that companies who are competing are going to spend time and resources attempting to debunk each other's claims while adding veracity to their own. In that regard, it's all fair game. I've been very clear, providing details, facts, and opinion related to those details and facts. Where are the Citrix counter-claims?

How does that phrase go again? There are lies, damn lies, and marketing? It will be up to people interpreting the messages to determine what they believe. I've very clearly provided a ton of detailed information about Citrix marketing claims that exposes the problems with their claims. I recommend they counter by providing detailed information about how CloudStack does meet their claims; however, this will not happen because their claims are unjustified.

If Citrix had made their claims differently, like "CloudStack has significantly more years of field deployments and development" it would be hard to argue with them. Instead, Citrix chose a course that grossly over-inflates their capabilities vis a vis AWS compatibility and architectural purity. There are a lot of great, accurate marketing claims that CloudStack could make, but many of the ones they did make, particularly those around Amazon are just far too easy to take apart.

I see this as a major marketing fail on Citrix's part. They are making my job very easy.

Re: An Appliance Does Not Make Your Software Architecture AWS Compatible

Pete Downing — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 09:41:38 -0000

Randy,

As you probably know... with a bold blog post like you have done, you will get some negative response. Some may be intelligent, some biased and some emotional. That aside, you do raise a very give question in the world of cloud... how much is too much marketing? Seriously!

Essentailly you are saying Citrix is over-marketing it's claims with CloudStack. Let's face it... isn't everyone over-marketing themselves in this wide open market called "cloud". Heck, it is even worse in the "open" arena because let's face it... companies who are consuming OpenStack and building a product have a very very small customer base or no customers. You have to over-market yourself to survive or hope that you get acquired!

Net, net... couldn't someone turn the tables on OpenStack and claim that is a bunch of marketing fluff and essentially write the same toned blog post you did?

Respectfully I think your effort to expose marketing claims by Citrix backfired! When I read your blog on GigaOm, I read it as an attack on CloudStack and a ploy to bring attention to CloudScaling... A.K.A. marketing. Let's face it... you guys have a new strategy with products and you want to ensure they are successful, right!!??

Just my three cents.

Pete

Disclaimer: I used to be an employee of Citrix Systems and I am now an employee of BMC Software. Anything I write is my own words and does not represent any company I am employed by.

Re: Citrix Joins Apache and Contributes CloudStack: Bold Move or Brash Decision?

randybias — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 11:10:39 -0000

No opinion until its launched and I can see it. I am pessimistic but open to it being awesome.

Re: Citrix Joins Apache and Contributes CloudStack: Bold Move or Brash Decision?

OBA17 — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 11:03:33 -0000

MSFT will be launching an IaaS version of Azure supporting Windows and Linux.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/micr...

Re: Citrix Joins Apache and Contributes CloudStack: Bold Move or Brash Decision?

Peder Ulander — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 15:52:03 -0000

You have the approx number, and yes, our trajectory was fantastic. There are many reasons to go through an exit, especially when dealing with strategic vs accretive valuations. Additionally, aligning with a big player that shares the same vision and has the ability to drive the right position in the market is a 1+1=3 move.

Re: Citrix Joins Apache and Contributes CloudStack: Bold Move or Brash Decision?

randybias — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 14:57:54 -0000

My information is old. It sounds like you are growing faster than I expected; however, Citrix can break out the CloudStack revenues in their 10-K numbers any time. The numbers available in the 2011 10-K are grouped under 'Cloud' which includes NetScalers and XenServer much more established product lines.
Here is what the 2011 10-K says:

"Product License revenue increased during 2011 when compared to 2010 primarily due to increased sales of our Desktop Solutions, led by XenDesktop of $141.5 million and increased sales of our Datacenter and Cloud Solutions, led by NetScaler, of $86.9 million."
So, the 10-K claims 86.9M for NetScaler, surely next largest is XenServer, followed by CloudStack. So, a 20M annual run rate is pretty good, if accurate.
If Cloud.com was on this trajectory last year, then why sell?

Re: Citrix Joins Apache and Contributes CloudStack: Bold Move or Brash Decision?

Peder Ulander — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 14:46:58 -0000

You know that I can't give specific comments on that as a public company and your claims that you have any idea of our revenue and then making that claim was unnecessary. I will assert that your number is not far off, if we are talking about quarterly revenues

Re: Citrix Joins Apache and Contributes CloudStack: Bold Move or Brash Decision?

randybias — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 14:36:24 -0000

Please feel free to correct. I'm sure people would like to know. They are only estimates based on your previous run rate.

Re: Citrix Joins Apache and Contributes CloudStack: Bold Move or Brash Decision?

Peder Ulander — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 14:35:09 -0000

You're revenue numbers are incorrect, by a significant discount.

Re: Citrix Joins Apache and Contributes CloudStack: Bold Move or Brash Decision?

Peder Ulander — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 14:33:23 -0000

Randy - we have 100 commercial/paid cloud deployments and significant number of deployments above that based on our OSS community. We are adding, on average, 10 new commercial clouds per month and that is on the rise.

Re: Citrix Joins Apache and Contributes CloudStack: Bold Move or Brash Decision?

randybias — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 17:59:17 -0000

I don't think anyone has real numbers, but my point is that it's just as much hand-waving to say CloudStack is 'winning' based on what's certainly < 5M in annual revenue as it is to say OpenStack is winning because they have a bigger contributor community. The closest thing you can do is measure size and/or number of deployments (paid or not). No one has exact numbers there, but as one of the earliest CloudStack deployers and now one of the key members of the OpenStack community, I've got a pretty good bead on where things are at. I'd say CloudStack is in the lead here for sure, but nearly as much as people think. Most people have been on the sidelines and are just now starting to spin up efforts. So, it's going to be a real race and I think that's just fine.

Re: Citrix Joins Apache and Contributes CloudStack: Bold Move or Brash Decision?

OBA17 — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 17:44:20 -0000

You would also have to reference the size of those deployments and any open source cloudstack deployments (non-customer) for those numbers to be interesting. Also selling private cloud 2.5 years ago - massively different than today where every enterprise, hosting provider and telco seems to have a project.

It will be interesting to see how it all plays out.

Re: Citrix Joins Apache and Contributes CloudStack: Bold Move or Brash Decision?

randybias — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 14:23:49 -0000

Measuring open source project success by revenue doesn't make sense. It's about adoption and deployments. By that measure the two projects are not very far apart.

Re: Citrix Joins Apache and Contributes CloudStack: Bold Move or Brash Decision?

randybias — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 14:17:47 -0000

There are 15 production OpenStack deployments. There are less than 50 CloudStack customers. That's not exactly a huge gap especially given CloudStack's 2.5 year lead.

Re: Citrix Joins Apache and Contributes CloudStack: Bold Move or Brash Decision?

Ed Laczynski — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 14:13:15 -0000

Agreed. When measuring the value of a platform, is the value in the # of open-source contributions to date, or the # of actual customers/market revenue attained? I'd argue the later.

Re: Citrix Joins Apache and Contributes CloudStack: Bold Move or Brash Decision?

OBA17 — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 13:29:31 -0000

This statement is interesting.

"Joining ASF adds a sense of open source legitimacy and may be a
defensive strategy on Citrix’s part to avoid obsolescence in the face of
OpenStack’s mindshare dominance".

Why would a company that is winning the battle for paying customers and large scale production implementations be concerned about 'avoiding obsolescence'?

To me this looks like a bold move from a position of strength. Citrix already owns the 'paying market' and now they are trying to steal Openstack's open source street cred.

It will be interesting to hear what, if anything, Citrix has to say about their experience as an Openstack contributer. I am guessing that like others they considered the process to be highly dysfunctional.

Re: Citrix Joins Apache and Contributes CloudStack: Bold Move or Brash Decision?

Twirrim — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 13:01:28 -0000

This maybe a stupid question, but what is Microsoft doing by way of IaaS? It doesn't seem like anything on a scale of OpenStack, CloudStack etc.