Most of IBM, Intel, HPE etc have thrown in the towel and now offer their own services on top of Red Hat OpenStack.
OpenStack has now found itself beyond enterprise, and now being the de-facto platform for NFV running mobile networks, and I guess Red Hat are becoming the winner here as they are so used to supporting an OpenStack 'type of' infrastructure for large bodies such as banking, telco, health etc. When you consider Red Hat are already large well established contributors to all of the layers of the OpenStack 'stack' such as KVM/QEMU , libvirt, the kernel itself, + overlay networking tech such as OVS, and now DPDK, you can see why they are well positioned to support and run OpenStack clouds.
[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/28/red_hat_cloud_quart...
Given all of the inter-dependencies between OpenStack services and lower level Linux constructs and software (OVS, Ceph, QEMU, etc.) those who were already used to distributing and managing these already turned out to be the ones who were best able to make the combination work.
That said at least some folks who were working on OpenStack and related technologies at Canonical are among those now looking for new gigs:
https://twitter.com/zulcss/status/852542117566189568
Thus while cloud remains on their priority list it is not immediately clear how big a part OpenStack will play in that going forward for Canonical versus solutions that run on the reigning public clouds.
Canonical seriously lacks expertise in KVM (+QEMU+libvirt), and you cannot take that for granted when you have a customer with VMs crashing that is asking for a fix.
FWIW, I recently had to explicitly inform the Canonical Virt maintainers (of which there seem to be very few) about which patches that ought to be backported to fix a bug in one of their libvirt packages that was seriously affecting (i.e. preventing from patches being merged) OpenStack upstream CI environment.
The said bug had fixes already available upstream, and are straight backports with no conflicts. No one bothered to do the "unsexy" work of backporting & cutting a quick stable build.
Only after pointing out the commits (with help from one of the lead upstream libvirt maintainers), and posting them on a LaunchPad bug, did the Ubuntu maintainers stepped in to backport the said fixes.
Cloud Foundry is built on technologies that predate k8s, but yes, containerisation is the unit of operational currency.
Insofar as Dell EMC has a multi-play, it also includes Pivotal, which is the leading contributor to Cloud Foundry. Unsurprisingly it runs smoothly on VMWare, as well as AWS, GCP, Azure, OpenStack and I forget what else.
Disclosure: I work on Cloud Foundry on behalf of Pivotal.
Just conjecture on my part, but I would have serious reservations about that part of their service catalog right now if I was vendor shopping.
Their own cloud isn't mentioned on it. They've obviously been putting their eggs in the consultancy basket for 6 months now,
Hell, even if you go to cloud in the menu, they're only advertising other clouds: https://www.rackspace.com/cloud You have to go through the 'Infrastructure' menu to find their own cloud offerings.
I'm wondering how long before we get notice we need to migrate away from them due to impending shutdowns.
IMO, OpenStack was sort of a consortium effort to compete with VMWare, AWS and Salesforce, but it's operational model is closest to AWS. Nearly all the big enterprise IT companies tied their rafts together hoping to stave the flow of customers. It doesn't appear to have worked.
RackSpace is advertising AWS migration and consulting services on podcasts I listen to. Not exactly a stellar testament for their own cloud product, but I think they still participate.
HP's strategy is a bit haphazard given the recent corporate splitup. On the plus side, the HP/HPE split seems to have allowed HPE to ditch all the weird www# URLs. They retired their public cloud, but still sell hardware that can run OpenStack at least.
Dell bought EMC, and proceeded to shut down their OpenStack offerings in favor of VMWare, which they own a substantial fraction of.
IBM is in a continual process of downsizing its hardware divisions in pursuit of higher earnings per share. It seems their big push is cloudfoundry, which seems to be more about containers and k8s.
So why are they bailing? I'm guessing:
- it's way harder to hire support staff for OpenStack, than VMWare - AWS reduces capital costs and upfront investments - Customers on existing solutions aren't prepared to take advantage of new opportunities - Many of these companies have existing product lines they don't wish to disrupt