Amazon Web Services vs Mirantis OpenStack

• AWS constantly innovates and iterates, announcing new features several times per year. Earlier this year, for example, they introduced provisioned IOPS for EBS, suddenly providing us with an inexpensive solution to a performance quandary we'd been facing.
• AWS has provided us with access to the product owners and architects of the products we use most. In turn, those resources provided us with visibility into the product road maps. This enabled us to improve our long-term infrastructure planning, and avoid expensive features that we'd get for free later in the year.
• AWS peremptorily lowers costs a couple of times per year. This has helped us keep our bill reasonable even as we consume more and more of the AWS services. We periodically compare the cost of AWS to the cost of moving into our colo, and every year the colo looks less and less attractive.

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• Works out of the box. There is very little back-end configuration necessary for users.
• The support is active and response times are very good.
• Staff is extremely knowledgeable and can help with more complex concepts and design ideas.

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• Occasionally, we disagree with their roadmap priorities. For example, we really needed Content-Based Routing added to ELB to support our multitenant implementation. The AWS architects agreed that it was a mainstream, valuable request and hinted that they were trying to get it onto the roadmap, but 15 months later there's still no sign of it. I'm sure they have their reasons, but it's a strange and annoying hole in an otherwise invaluable service.
• AWS has had well-publicized outages that have broken the promise of true zone (datacenter) isolation. This was supposed to have been impossible - if you had instances running in two zones within a region, you thought had a solid survivability story. We were forced to react by building out additional redundancy that increased costs beyond our original design estimates. AWS claims to have resolved the problem, but we haven't been confident enough to spin down the extra servers yet.
• There are annoying resource limits, presumably in place to prevent hackers from allocating huge numbers of resources on a compromised account. The problem is that raising the resource limits requires manual action to be taken, and can have a severe impact on production software if your ops team isn't meticulous in checking the limits. As of the last time I checked, these limits weren't available via API, making it impossible to create alarms whenever we get close to exceeding our resource limits.
• AWS is relatively infamous for their poor communications during outages. Their status page will occasionally go without an update for 45 minutes, while half your customers are dead in the water. This is - obviously - infuriating.

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• Mirantis OpenStack managed services are expensive. Very expensive for a start-up.
• I'd personally like to see a little more under the hood details in the status pages.
• Mirantis could also benefit heavily from a free "light" version that start-ups could use to run their own cloud. Maybe coupled with advertising or some sort of surveys.

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• Positive: Faster provisioning of infrastructure.
• Positive: Lower upfront costs.
• Negative: Integration of AWS to enterprise apps.

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• Mirantis did help our business figure out if openstack was right for us.
• Using Mirantis I felt a bit cheated on understanding the deep technical knowledge of how openstack works. But that being said that is probably a value add more than a detractor for most people.
• Using Mirantis was considerably cheaper than AWS.

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