At the openstack design summit, I had the opportunity to talk to many people about the project. I got some good feedback, but as a rule people that attended the summit were biased towards positive comments. So, I would like to ask a broader audience.
What are we doing right and what are we doing wrong? If you like it, why? Are you attracted to the openness of the project, the fact that so many companies are involved, …? If you don’t like it, have you looked closely, and what did you find that you didn’t like? What would it take to win you over?
Please leave comments.
Rick,
For a second design summit, I think the traction around the OpenStack community and the products is excellent. There is clearly a lot of interest with many large (and small) technology partners jostling to find their position in the near and long term.
From my perspective, it’s somewhat interesting as both an “open” platform (clearly that is an advantage of other like offerings) and also from an infrastructure efficiency standpoint – but the key piece in my opinion that will really make a difference is “how much further up the stack will you go”.
As I said in my presentation, server virtualization, efficient compute and object storage are great building blocks but the real business value (and the one I think will help sell OpenStack to CIOs and not CTOs) is in how application workloads are built, deployed and managed on top of enabling infrastructure platforms. This is where enterprises (not necessarily cloud providers who just care about IaaS) will be attracted to a real value proposition.
There will also need to be a solid commercial support model around this, from a selection of trusted and respected parties. To use an analogy, CentOS is very attractive as an alternative to Red Hat, but there is very little in the way of comprehensive support – hence we don’t use it for production workloads.
In short, I think the inertia is fantastic, but it’s more than just IaaS that will turn large corporations away from other comparable products as this race hots up.
Christian
Hi Rick and Christian
I think “how much further up the stack will you go” is important topic too.
For example,which one is in the openstack scope?
OpenStack CPU
OpenStack Linux kernel
OpenStack VPN
OpenStack RDS
OpenStack AutoScale
OpenStack CloudWatch
OpenStack App Engine
OpenStack CRM
OpenStack Bug Tracking System
OpenStack Twitter
OpenStack Blog
OpenStack Mail
OpenStack SpreadSheet
I checked the definition of scope.
http://www.slideshare.net/openstackcommgr/openstack-architecture-board
However, there are many version of definition of “Cloud”.
Nati
If possible, would like to hear your thoughts about transferring the project’s governance to the Apache Software Foundation.
I have been asked this question frequently. I have great admiration for the Apache Software Foundation, and think in general that foundations are a good choice.
In my humble, and possibly ignorant opinion, the Apache Software Foundation is a great place for a project in two common cases:
When you need the incubation and attention that can come from the incubator. This is usually nascent projects that need help growing a community.
When you are a very large project and need organization and governance that the ASF can provide. Projects built internally by large companies, like the former Sun Microsystems, fall into this category.
When we were starting this we felt that we fell in between these two extremes. The growth has been tremendous and we probably are tipping closer to the second category.
Plus, we have some ideas of our own. We see openstack as a group of tightly integrated components/projects that have a coordinated release and integrated testing. While I don’t think that necessarily conflicts with the ASF, I think we like the ability to experiment with organization until we get it right for us.
I, personally, would love to see the source in some kind of foundation, after we prove we can meet the needs of our main contributors, Rackspace and NASA.
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