On April Fools day, another cloud provider closed down without any warning. FierceBigData reports that OpenStack cloud vendor Nebula ceased operations on April 01, 2015 without ever a heads-up.
The firm, founded in 2011 by former NASA CTO, Chris Kemp, appeared to have it under control. According to CSC, they seemed to have customers for its Nebula Cloud Controller, an appliance that integrated up to forty x86 white-box servers into a turnkey OpenStack cloud. Customers of Nebula have included Lockheed Martin, Shutterfly, Sandia National Laboratories, and Genentech.
The company also had a fat war-chest of almost $40 million from top-tier VCs. Silicon Angle reports that Nebula managed to burn $38.5 million in venture capital prior to its closure, from investors including Webb Investment Network, Comcast Ventures, Scott McNealy, William Hearts II, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Highland Capital Partners, and others.
Despite its well-stocked war-chest, customer support ended immediately. The defunct company told its former customers to turn to “OpenStack products from vendors including Red Hat, IBM (IBM), HP (HPQ) and others.”
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The stability of cloud providers is really questionable. I have covered other cloud provider implosions; MegaCloud, Nirvanix, and Code Spaces.
In the end, it is as simple as the author says the moral of the story is “that you should look very carefully at your partners … you must be able to count on your system integrator, value-added reseller, whoever, to be there when you need them.
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.