←back to thread

VMware's in court again. Customer relationships rarely go this wrong

(www.theregister.com)
245 points rntn | 2 comments | 08 Sep 25 12:00 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
wkat4242 ◴[08 Sep 25 12:42 UTC] No.45167565[source]▶
The bigger issue is, if you're refusing to honour a contract as a vendor, not only do you risk a lawsuit like this one. But more importantly, who is ever going to sign up for another contract with you? You just proved it isn't worth the paper it's written on.

Unwritten terms like "valid until I decide to tear it up haha lol" are not generally appreciated by companies that depend on your stuff for their business. Of course you can extort your existing customers until they manage to move away but basically in the longer term you're suiciding your entire business.

replies(11): >>45167604 #>>45167610 #>>45167646 #>>45167690 #>>45167794 #>>45168811 #>>45168947 #>>45169373 #>>45170174 #>>45173303 #>>45173437 #
spwa4 ◴[08 Sep 25 12:46 UTC] No.45167604[source]▶
So switch to openstack or kubernetes (with kubevirt if you want VMs). Open source. Way more beautiful design.

With Kubernetes, actually fast storage if you need it. Can scale up to AI demands if you need it.

Or proxmox or the like if you're small enough.

replies(3): >>45167613 #>>45167681 #>>45167808 #
stego-tech ◴[08 Sep 25 12:56 UTC] No.45167681[source]▶
My beef with K8s (and to be clear, it’s the leanest cut of beef from the deli - so not much substance to it) is that unless you pay someone else to manage the Control Plane for you, you’re not only going to need to upskill your workers on K8s itself but also administering the components of the Control Plane, like HA, etcd, storage, network plane, etc.

Compared to standing up literally any Linux distro and KVM, K8s remains an overly complex PITA to get off the ground and integrated into an org on the cheap/free. In that area, it handily loses to even Microsoft Hyper-V in the “just get us going” category of business adoption/velocity.

I’d really, really like to see K8s more streamlined for initial deployment than it is. It’s getting better, but I generally still have to grudgingly recommend a premium, managed control plane for any serious deployment.

replies(3): >>45168576 #>>45168790 #>>45172302 #
1. imglorp ◴[08 Sep 25 14:14 UTC] No.45168576[source]▶
For small on-prem shops that don't really want to learn about running k8s, and have under a few dozen nodes, there are definitely slim options, like Talos is basically boot to k8s, and for single app level, there's things like multi-node k0s. Tech like this means you can reduce the control plane labor and focus on the workload.

https://www.talos.dev

https://docs.k0sproject.io/v0.11.0/k0s-multi-node

replies(1): >>45169013 #
2. stego-tech ◴[08 Sep 25 14:48 UTC] No.45169013[source]▶
Talos is on my shortlist but its core “grease” features remain locked behind a (reasonable, but still existent) subscription, which throws it into “premium management layer” territory for me and my odd slide deck for executives. The narrative for the past fifteen years has consistently been “we have no money for what we need because we spent it all on what Gartner suggested and a consultant told us we should have”, which means we’re constantly having to not only do more with less, but also rely heavily on “pre-greased” products like hypervisors.

I don’t like it, but that’s how the current technology environment is unfortunately setup.

God help the enterprise software segment if customers realize 90% of their needs are served perfectly well with KVM+QEMU and VMs.