If you read the news you get the impression that OpenStack is the answer to anything (along with Docker but that’s for another post). I would like to balance this hype a bit. This post is my personal opinion.

tl;dr – TCO much higher than expected

When I first started working with OpenStack few years ago numerous issues caused me to mentally summarize “Not ready for production, re-visit in a year or two”. Unfortunately this still stands in 2016.

If you are considering OpenStack for your private cloud, think twice. Here are some examples of what I experienced few years back till now with two different clients that use OpenStack.

1. Using API is a suffer
   1. API is inconsistent between components like Nova and Neutron so you will have more code.
   2. Neutron documentation for Python client is ridiculous: create network and list networks. That’s all. This is in contrast to the counterpart Nova documentation which is OK.
2. Few years ago I have edited instance types (“flavors”) using the web UI. Somehow it screwed up all the types. Unfortunately I don’t know if there was an open issue for that.
3. About a year ago we had production system workaround with a line of bash that would do internal ping within the message bus that OpenStack uses. Without this it would randomly get stuck and not respond to any management commands (create/delete instance for example). If I remember correctly this bug was fixed in Juno or Kilo, unfortunately I can’t find it.

Be sure to visit the bugs lists before your decision.