So, I’ve messed around with technology for a long time. Mostly struggled through tech since I don’t have an opportunity to get hands on very often, but eventually I get to where I want to go when I start brewing with new tech/platform ingredients
This post triggered because of the struggles I’ve had with OpenStack. It almost has me defeated. Frustrated, hopping mad and possibly with a mild case of…(nah! that might be too much information). Anyway, I wanted to leave some breadcrumbs behind – a caveat emptor, for those that may want to start something similar
OpenStack is freakishly difficult! I guess setting up a cloud is a nontrivial activity. I attempted it for a home lab because I wanted to really experience the cloud’s operating principles. People more prescient than me: senior architects told me to just open an AWS account and play with it, but I figured – hey! I’ve messed with unknown technologies before. How hard can this be? Plus, with AWS the free tier is absolutely useless (my opinion – don’t shoot the messenger!) and with a paid service I lacked the discipline to really use it on demand and remember to shut it down in the long in-between periods.
My wife just thinks I wanted to buy some hardware and feel like a techie nerd and secretly I think she’s right.
But boy was I wrong with the choice of OpenStack.
As I write it’s been 4 weeks and for the past 26 days, I’ve just been troubleshooting the networking set-up for one compute instance with no end in sight. I start some travel for work and when I’m back with some time on my hands in a couple of weeks, I’ll attempt one last time to fix this. If I can, there’ll be another post. If not, this is an entreatment to other accidental techie’s – go build an operating system, troubleshoot auto-pilot software, but leave OpenStack for the professionals!
quisense.com 