Nebula Folds as Consolidation Looms for OpenStack Scene

It's a big week on the OpenStack front. Mirantis has joined the Cloud Foundry Foundation, focusing on OpenStack and PaaS, and Nebula startup company that sold data center hardware tools for deploying OpenStack clouds has announced that it is shutting down. Nebula took shape in 2011, just as OpenStack was ramping up, with offices in Seattle and Mountain View, California.

"It is with an extremely heavy heart that we announce that Nebula is ceasing operations," company officials wrote in a blog post.

The post added that support at some deployments will cease:

"This is a difficult announcement for us to make and we want to assure our customers, shareholders, and employees that we have worked hard to explore alternatives and exhausted all potential options."

"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 private clouds deployed at customer sites will continue to operate normally, however support will no longer be available. Nebula is based on OpenStack and is compatible with OpenStack products from vendors including Red Hat, IBM, HP and others, providing customers with a number of choices moving forward."

"We want to thank the incredible Nebula team that has worked so hard over the past four years. We would also like to thank our valued customers and partners for their support, as well as our world-class investors and board members."

I've written before about expected consolidation and attrition on the OpenStack scene. While it's a hot tech category, there are enough players that we're going to see some of them fold.

In the end, this will cause support to be the big differentiator, and it is notable that Nebula will not be offering further support at deployments, according to its announcement.

Customers of Nebula have included Lockheed Martin, Shutterfly, Sandia National Laboratories, and Genentech.  Comcast Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Highland Capital Partners had all funded the company.