Comment by mdaniel
6 months ago
Because I have been curious about this for so long, and you said "It's built on mostly open source technology" I figured now's my chance to ask:
Why roll your own control plane when OpenStack ships with so many batteries included, and (arguably important) doesn't require someone making a vanity SDK to interact with your vanity cloud?
This is a fantastic and fundamental question. We evaluated OpenStack, and it's an incredibly powerful and comprehensive project. For us, it came down to two things: complexity and opinionation. Complexity: OpenStack is a massive suite of services designed to do everything for everyone. We needed to do one thing exceptionally well: provide high-performance, dedicated-core VMs with a dead-simple control plane. The operational overhead of running a full OpenStack cluster felt like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut for our specific, focused use case. Opinionation: We have very strong opinions about how the user experience should feel (e.g., the simple slider for scaling, the transparent pricing unit). Building our own control plane allowed us to bake those opinions directly into the product from the ground up, without fighting the "OpenStack way" of doing things. It let us focus obsessively on the user-facing API and CLI experience. It was definitely a harder path in the short term, but it's given us the freedom to build exactly the lean, fast, and user-friendly platform we envisioned.
Yeah but we definitely will get there, this also is not a race per se. Finishing quickly is important but finishing safely for everyone %99.99 of the time is probably the most important thing, next to a flashy UI/UX. We definitely have attention of some fantastic people and of course it will be even better when the bills can be more easily managed or offset costs. I know I immediately stopped paying for all my other cloud services and deposited to float an early bump but also importantly to test the payment systems. Last thing we need is that to fail for a user who has already been sold.