Re:AWS vs. GCP reliability is wildly different
by sofixa on Thursday September 22, 2022 @02:37AM
(#32935467)
So, i used to be a part time vSphere admin, worked with many others, and had to automate the hell out of it to deal as little as possible with that dumpster fire.
No, VMware didn't miss the boat, vCloud Air was announced in 2009 and made generally available in 2013. Roughly same timelines as Azure and GCP, slightly trailing AWS, and those were the early days, where the public cloud was still exotic. And VMware had the massive advantage of brand recognition in that domain and existing footprint with enterprises which could be scaled out.
Problem was, vCloud Air, like vSphere, was shit. Yeah, it did some things well, and had some very nice features - vMotion, DRS (though it doesn't really use CPU ready contention for scheduling decisions which is stupid), vSAN, hot adding resources (but not RAM, because decades ago Linux had issues if you had less than 4GB RAM and you added more, so to this day you can't do that). When they worked, because when they didn't, good luck because error messages are useless, logs are weirdly structured and uselessly verbose, so a massive pain to deal with. Oh and many of those features were either behind a Flash UI(FFS), or an abomination of an API that is inconsistent ("this object might have been deleted or hasn't been created yet") and had weird limitations like when you have an async task you can't check it's status details. And many of those features were so complex, that a random consuming user basically had to rely on a dedicated team of vExperts, which often resulted in a nice silo slowing everyone down.
Their hardware compatibility list was a joke - the Intel X710 NIC stayed on it for more than a year with a widely known terribly broken driver.
But what made VMware fail the most, IMHO, was the wrong focus, technically - VM, instead of application. A developer/ops person couldn't care less about the object of a VM. Of course they tried some things like vApp and vCloud Director etc. which are just disgusting abominations designed with a PowerPoint in mind, not a user. And pricing. Opaque and expensive, with bad usability. No wonder everyone jumped on the pay as you go, usable alternatives.
No, VMware didn't miss the boat, vCloud Air was announced in 2009 and made generally available in 2013. Roughly same timelines as Azure and GCP, slightly trailing AWS, and those were the early days, where the public cloud was still exotic. And VMware had the massive advantage of brand recognition in that domain and existing footprint with enterprises which could be scaled out.
Problem was, vCloud Air, like vSphere, was shit. Yeah, it did some things well, and had some very nice features - vMotion, DRS (though it doesn't really use CPU ready contention for scheduling decisions which is stupid), vSAN, hot adding resources (but not RAM, because decades ago Linux had issues if you had less than 4GB RAM and you added more, so to this day you can't do that). When they worked, because when they didn't, good luck because error messages are useless, logs are weirdly structured and uselessly verbose, so a massive pain to deal with. Oh and many of those features were either behind a Flash UI(FFS), or an abomination of an API that is inconsistent ("this object might have been deleted or hasn't been created yet") and had weird limitations like when you have an async task you can't check it's status details. And many of those features were so complex, that a random consuming user basically had to rely on a dedicated team of vExperts, which often resulted in a nice silo slowing everyone down.
Their hardware compatibility list was a joke - the Intel X710 NIC stayed on it for more than a year with a widely known terribly broken driver.
But what made VMware fail the most, IMHO, was the wrong focus, technically - VM, instead of application. A developer/ops person couldn't care less about the object of a VM. Of course they tried some things like vApp and vCloud Director etc. which are just disgusting abominations designed with a PowerPoint in mind, not a user. And pricing. Opaque and expensive, with bad usability. No wonder everyone jumped on the pay as you go, usable alternatives.