Nebula shuts down

Nebula, a cloud “appliance” (and company) has shut down. The software is open source, so their customers can pay others to provide support, or migrate to another stack. This isn’t a public cloud company, rather a private cloud company. There is little operational risk in moving from one openstack build to another. Feel free to reach out to me (landman @ scalability.org) privately if you need to speak to someone about this. The VMs are there, the data is there, all you need is a migration plan and target. This would be very different if you were using a public cloud and it shut down. Then you have a significant potential of loss of data, IP, capability. I know, I know … Amazon et al will never close/change their business. IBM won’t turn off any part of Softlayer. Rackspace will just keep on operating. Remember, companies like Sun never (almost) went out of business. GM didn’t need a bail out. Worldcomm? From a risk mitigation perspective, every instance of business importance in the public cloud should be mirrored internally. If its not important, its ephemeral, and you get the best of all possible worlds in the public cloud. But if you have data that has value of any sort, you either need replication between disparate cloud providers, or you need an internal cloud as well as an external cloud for purely risk mitigation reasons. Internal clouds have very low risk, apart from provider going belly up. And if they do, you need a solid migration plan and capability. I think I hit on an interesting business. This is going to become far more important over time. Cloud infrastructure, and migration capability between vendors. Nebula going away won’t harm much. Amazon going down would. The former won’t massively increase risk. Risk mitigation for important things needs to be done on the latter. We are agnostic, building private and public clouds. And we want our customers to be in business a long time, and be customers of ours for a long time. So risk mitigation is an important step when you lengthen the value chain with external computing and storage providers. “Cheaper” always has a cost associated with it.