Nebula OpenStack Cloud Provider Shuts Down

OpenStack cloud startup Nebula has ceased its operations, claiming that the OpenStack market is years away from reaching maturity. A ‘shutting down’ message was posted on the firm’s homepage on April 1.

Nebula was started in 2011 by the former NASA CTO Chris Kemp, and provided private cloud hardware and software for the enterprise.

“It is with an extremely heavy heart that we announce that today, April 1, 2015, Nebula is ceasing operations,” said the message displayed on the Nebula website.

Proud

“When we started this journey four years ago, we set out to usher in a new era of cloud computing by curating and productizing OpenStack for the enterprise. We are incredibly proud of the role we had in establishing Nebula as the leading enterprise cloud computing platform. At the same time, we are deeply disappointed that the market will likely take another several years to mature. As a venture backed start up, we did not have the resources to wait.”

Nebula reassured current customers of its cloud services that its private clouds will continue to operate normally, minus the support. Nebula pointed customers towards using compatible OpenStack friends and competitors Red Hat, IBM, and HP. Current customers included Lockheed Martin and Genentech.

Chris Kemp is a cofounder of the OpenStack project, and started work on the early stages of the platform whilst at NASA’s Ames Research Center.

Privately held Nebula, which LinkedIn cites as having 51-200 employees, had offices in Mountain View and Seattle. Recent anonymous Glassdoor reviews of the company hinted towards leadership problems at the startup. One user, who claimed to be an intern at the company in 2014, said: “There is occasionally a bit of bureaucratic in-fighting among the higher-ups at Nebula, and as a result getting support for a product change can be unnecessarily difficult.”

Another intern, who posted a review in January 2014, said: “Company-wide, the right hand doesn’t always know what the left hand is doing. As a growing and changing organization, we need to get better at checking assumptions and communicating with each other.”

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