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Announcements => News Articles => Topic started by: parkdale on July 25, 2019, 01:17:05 PM

Title: BT Adopts Open Stack (Ubuntu)
Post by: parkdale on July 25, 2019, 01:17:05 PM
Found this interesting snippet on The Register...
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/07/24/bt_adopts_openstack_5g/
Title: Re: BT Adopts Open Stack (Ubuntu)
Post by: Weaver on July 25, 2019, 01:53:51 PM
Almost completely unreadable, the level of vagueness and the buzzword density. The article and writing like this has become ‘cloud’ itself, meaning that in the writing the authors refer to who-knows-what, you the reader are not allowed to know what’s-what (encapsulation) and that is as true for the writing itself as for the the things referred to in it.
Title: Re: BT Adopts Open Stack (Ubuntu)
Post by: displaced on July 25, 2019, 03:21:18 PM
It’s bad reporting by thereg (kinda par for the course for them), but OpenStack is quite a good framework to build with.

IIRC, back when I was looking at jobs with them, BBC R&D were building services to manage video streams, studios and library footage all with OpenStack.

Probably the most interesting part is that BT have chosen Canonical to do the heavy lifting, rather than do it themselves.

(at least that’s what I read into it - again, the reporting is bad!)
Title: Re: BT Adopts Open Stack (Ubuntu)
Post by: Alex Atkin UK on July 29, 2019, 05:05:57 AM
The BBC has been a BIG supporter of Open Source in general, its just not widely reported.

It makes sense for BT to move aspects of their network away from proprietary vendors who are known to be doing a pretty poor job, causing security and reliability issues.

It always amazes me that almost all routers are built on Open Source but using ancient versions of said software, far from optimal and with potential security vulnerabilities.  Its especially annoying that core features (DSL, WiFi) are locked behind binary drivers built against ancient kernels, hampering the end user from switching to better supported third-party firmware.

Even when we can, drivers like Ath10k never perform as well as the proprietary crap in stock firmware.  It seems to be that putting optimisations into the binary firmware is a way to avoid feeding back improvements into the underlying Open Source software.  They reap the benefits while avoiding their responsibility to improve the software for everyone else, a core purpose of Open Source.
Title: Re: BT Adopts Open Stack (Ubuntu)
Post by: Alex Atkin UK on July 29, 2019, 05:38:36 AM
Quote
almost every part of infrastructure wants to become cloud-like

It honestly baffles me how "cloud" has suddenly transitioned from being "run from remote servers in the Internet" to "run from centralised servers on the network".

If its run from a central cluster on your network, its not a bloody cloud, its a server cluster - what we were using BEFORE the cloud.  The fact it might be more efficient using technology that was developed for cloud use, doesn't make it a cloud.
Title: Re: BT Adopts Open Stack (Ubuntu)
Post by: tubaman on July 29, 2019, 08:50:04 AM
It honestly baffles me how "cloud" has suddenly transitioned from being "run from remote servers in the Internet" to "run from centralised servers on the network".

If its run from a central cluster on your network, its not a bloody cloud, its a server cluster - what we were using BEFORE the cloud.  The fact it might be more efficient using technology that was developed for cloud use, doesn't make it a cloud.

It's a good job I didn't have coffee in my mouth when I read this as it would now have been all over my screen. :lol:
"Cloud" is just the latest buzzword to part those who don't understand IT from their money. Everything runs on hardware sitting in a server room somewhere - it's not magic!
Title: Re: BT Adopts Open Stack (Ubuntu)
Post by: Weaver on July 31, 2019, 04:13:49 AM
Cloud is annoying me, but still not as much as the prepositional phrase ‘on line’ eg ‘she met him on line’ = on <where>? where = the internet or ‘he went on line’ = he fired up a web browser (unless the user still thinks that a link will go online = connected [- as opposed to being in the offline state]; which is fine linguistically but wrong factually as no one uses dialup any more)
Title: Re: BT Adopts Open Stack (Ubuntu)
Post by: g3uiss on July 31, 2019, 09:59:24 PM
Quote
"Cloud" is just the latest buzzword to part those who don't understand IT from their money. Everything runs on hardware sitting in a server room somewhere - it's not magic!

I suspect part of the problem is vendors selling their servers to a wider audience hence “ cloud based” then of course you would expect them to.

We have been looking at Azure to replace on site  Domain controllers, but it’s really expensive!

[Moderator edited to fix the broken quote.]