There’s a great demo from the recent OpenStack Summit (wish I had been there):

OpenStack is a known massive pain to get up and running, and having it in a reasonable set of containers that might be used to deploy it by default is really interesting to see. This is available in Quay as Stackanetes, which is a pretty awful name (as is Stackenetes, and Stackernetes, both of which were googlewhacks earlier today) for some great work.

I’m entirely convinced that I would never actually run anything like this in production for most conceivable workloads because there’s so much duplication going on, but for those people with a specific need to make AWS-like capability available as a service within their organisation (who are you people?!) this makes a lot of sense.

I can’t help but feel there is a large amount of simplification in this space coming, though. While “Google for everyone else” is an interesting challenge, the truth is that everyone else is nothing like Google, and most challenges people face are actually relatively mundane:

• how do I persist storage across physical hosts in a way that is relatively ACID?
• how do I start resilient applications and distribute their configuration appropriately?
• how do I implement my various ongoing administrative processes?

This is why I’m a big fan of projects like Deis for businesses operating up to quite substantial levels of scale: enforcing some very specific patterns on the application, as far as possible, is vastly preferable to maintaining a platform that has to encompass large amounts of functionality to support its applications. Every additional service and configuration is another thing to go wrong, and while things can made pretty bullet-proof, overall you have to expect the failure rate to increase (this is just a mathematical truth).

CoreOS in many ways is such a simplification: universal adoption of cloud-config, opinion about systemd and etcd, for example. And while we’re not going to go all the way back to Mosix-like visions of cluster computing, it seems clear that many existing OS-level services are actually going to become cluster-level services by default – logging being a really obvious one – and that even at scale, OpenStack-type solutions are much more complicated than you actually want.