We're definitely seeing an uptick in interest for Triton Datacenter[1] from vSphere users looking for alternatives.
Aside from Triton, there's a quite a bit of interest in Proxmox and XCP-ng in the community.
While alternatives are gaining popularity, they certainly do not have the same ecosystem that VMware users are accustomed to. Organizations are going to have to pony up, or make concessions.
Our team from Triton DataCenter & SmartOS[1] is also working on an immutable Linux distribution[2] based on Debian + ZFS + LXC.
Currently this is supported on Triton DataCenter only, but our internal roadmap has us building a standalone version similar to how folks use SmartOS standalone.
The choice doesn't have to be solely on-prem OR cloud. We're seeing a hybrid approach often as a first step. More predictable, fixed workloads can move back on-prem for cost-efficiency, while keeping elastic workloads in the cloud for flexibility.
The key to success is having the right on-prem solution to help bring both teams together while driving costs down. Our solution at Triton Datacenter (https://tritondatacenter.com) has helped various enterprises tackle this issue by providing a public cloud-like experience on-prem.
That’s a great experience with Linode.. We’re certainly expanding our options and with our recent acquisition of Joyent’s Triton DataCenter it’s also 100% open source — maybe one day we get to talk again! Thanks for the feedback too.
It does look to be a good price/value.. though I wonder if they continue with that under Akamai. We're at the $250/server price point -- and we include a number of items:
- Realtime kernel/lib patching.
- Patch management.
- 24x7 monitoring and response.
- Metric collections, alerting, and health reviews.
- Tuning and infrastructure best practices wherever you are (AWS/GCP/Azure/mnx/colo).
- Ad-hoc support - example this week -- one customer who runs large ecommerce valentine day related -- needed eyes on all infrastructure. We sat in slack with them, and huddled realtime to work through any issues.
I do understand.. and sometimes cheap is what you want. When you want something else -- like customer service, this is where mnx.io shines. I would consider mnx.io to be a boutique cloud provider, prioritize quality/reliability and customer service, allowing us to build close relationships with our customers. As a boutique provider, we know most of our customers by name and focus on providing the resources necessary to ensure reliable, long-term sustainability.
At MNX, we manage your infrastructure at your existing provider or ours (mnx.io) and provide 24x7 monitoring and response. Our customers usually have 10+ servers, and pricing starts at ~$2500/month.
We went down the Openstack path long ago.. but ended up choosing Triton DataCenter. The simplicity in operational support is just amazing. We’ve since acquired the commercial support business from Joyent this year for Triton.
Triton is much simpler to operate, manage and support - and we’ve never looked back!
I really like this description of how baremetal infrastructure should work, and this is where I think (shameless self promotion) Triton DataCenter[1] plays really well today on-prem.
PXE booted lightweight compute nodes with a robust API, including operator portal, user portal, and cli.
Keep an eye out for the work we are doing with Triton Linux + K8s. Very lightweight Triton Linux compute node + baremetal k8s deployments on Triton.
Triton DataCenter[1] is open source[2], and has commercial revenue in excess of $1M ARR. We were fortunate to acquire this product from Joyent earlier this year[3], and are now well on our way to the next revenue target.
Triton was built on the backs of giants -- so a slightly different scenario than most.. But it is clear that customers will pay for open source products, and you can more than pay your rent one day!
MNX acquired[1] SmartOS (and Triton DataCenter) earlier this year from Samsung. We're continuing development and have continued with a bi-weekly release cycle.