Canonical OpenStack vs. Rackspace OpenStack vs. Red Hat OpenStack Platform

Ubuntu OpenStack is well suited for startups where there are very tight financial constraints. As Ubuntu OpenStack is open source, the startup organizations will not have to spend a lot when compared to their commercial offerings in the market. Ubuntu OpenStack is less appropriate in organizations where they don't want to have private on-prem clouds. As deploying a private on-prem cloud is a very cumbersome and tedious task, the organizations must have a dedicated team to manage such on-prem deployments.

Incentivized

Need to get an application up and running, then I would say the open stack is a great place to test it out. Why spend time setting things up when you can let them do it for you? Many people also have experience with using Rackspace in some capacity so its an easier learning curve for many people.

Incentivized

Best suited for - any organization where you have people who already have expertise on OpenStack, Linux & IP networking. Otherwise, the maintenance & operations will be difficult. When the number of deployed VMs reaches its capacity, it becomes very difficult to manage Red Hat OpenStack because there are no in-built fault management & performance management tools available within Red Hat OpenStack. Not suited for - Organizations where people have a culture of working on automated GUI-based tools. Here VMware wins over Red Hat OpenStack. Also where you have mission-critical applications where downtime cannot be tolerated.

Incentivized

• Very easy to use, learning curve is very short. Don't need to invest months of training before using it
• Well suited with Jenkins for automated tests
• Works well on large sets of heterogeneous hardware

• Quick uptime
• Simple Signup
• Lots of options on what you need
• Rackspace is a known company (not some unknown startup)

Incentivized

• Scaling of application components (VMs).
• Managing the networking between virtual machines.
• Management of VNFs & the underlying infrastructure.
• Availability & uptime of VMs because of features like VM migration & evacuation.

Incentivized

• More customizable options while choosing virtual machine configurations would be great.
• To have regular online learning sessions directly from Ubuntu OpenStack experts [to] help users and for those who implement it.
• Giving admin more control on what privileges they can grant to their users.

Incentivized

• Support does not seem to be what it use to be, use to be a solid 10 when dealing with them, now more like an 8
• Pricing can be tricky to figure out
• For some people too many options.

Incentivized

• User management really needs improvement - when compared to AWS or GCP.
• Security of the overall platform needs to be improved.
• The whole architecture needs to be modular which is not. Ex - Upgrading any particular component (nova, neutron, cinder) should be possible without upgrading the whole Red Hat OpenStack version.
• The creation of HEAT templates for complex applications is still a challenge & has a dependency on external tools.
• Stack creation still requires parameters modification at controllers & compute because of the complex nova-scheduler algorithm.

Incentivized

Everybody knows VMWare which is the world's number one in data center infrastructure management. OpenStack is lot lot less expensive but doesn't offer all the functionalities you have with VMWare especially for High Availability and load balancing. You should go for OpenStack if you need an easy to use solution without the need for external consultants. If you don't have the capacity to manage your own infrastructure you had better go for VMWare.

I looked into going with Amazon EC2, was very comparable in pricing, services, options, etc. and a bit cheaper too. Why I did not go with Amazon mainly has to do with knowing Rackspace and being familiar with them. It was easier for me to use a Rackspace product then go with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

Incentivized

Only because of low cost & zero licensing of Red Hat OpenStack

Incentivized

• Lighter on initial spending for the organization.
• Deployments which have no vendor locking makes management decisions easier.
• Support from great community saved lot of time for engineers managing it.

Incentivized

• Quick setup allowed me to work on the application not setup of where it was going to run
• Expand ability with a few clicks was a great help, no worrying about if I needed more "power", few clicks and I had it.
• Tech support is hit or miss so that can be problematic and that was cause for concern and took time away from development

Incentivized

• Saved CAPEX for sure (I can't quote a figure).
• Saved Opex also - because a large support community is already available.
• Increased complexity of system setup though.

Incentivized