Fairwell HP Public Cloud

I got started in OpenStack when I took an unexpected job opportunity at HP to help stand up Neutron in the second release of HP Public Cloud. At the time, it was among the largest scale deployments of Neutron in existence. I suspect it was the largest at the time.

One of the perks of the job was access to free virtual machines to use for work and even some personal use. I didn’t pay for cloud resources for 3 years. It was reliable and reasonably performant. I think I probably would have used it even if I had to pay.

Unfortunately, after its initial release in 2013, we didn’t put effort in to updating it. While it was a great engineering accomplishment, it was superseded and became obsolete.

A couple of months ago, as I had suspected would happen, HPE announced a new model to deliver public cloud that would include the sunset of the current deployment and deliver public could by partnering with others. This was a bittersweet moment for me but, more practically, it meant that I had to find a new cloud provider.

I decided to write this post now because I spent a decent part of the day moving my personal stuff off of HP Public Cloud and I no longer have anything running out there. I thought it appropriate to mark the occasion with this post.

I have to say that my transition was made a lot easier because I ran my services in Docker containers. Moving them was mostly a matter of booting VMs, installing docker, moving a bit of data from one storage to another, running the Dockerfiles, and twiddling DNS. I’ll admit it took me a little longer than it needed to because I felt the need to update software versions and reorganize my source files a bit.

When all was said and done, I moved a personal gerrit server (hosting personal projects including the source code for this blog), my home-grown finance software, this blog server, a VPN server, my Openstack development machines and devstacks, and some archives.

I’ll always think fondly of the time that I spent on HP Public Cloud. Despite its short-comings and eventual demise, I consider it a great personal accomplish and something I’ll always be proud of.