Last week I spent some time at the OpenStack Design Summit and Conference at Santa Clara, talking to developers, ecosystem partners, analysts, etc. on where OpenStack (previous CloudAve coverage) is headed. There were almost 500 people from the OpenStack community who attended the event. There was excitement in the air and I saw many new entrants coming in to see how they can contribute/benefit from the OpenStack project. In this post, I will do a recap of the event based on my interactions with some of the attendees.
Before I even discuss the event, I want to list out some interesting facts about OpenStack project
- OpenStack was launched in 2010 at the OSCON event in Portland
- OpenStack now has the third version of the code released and the most recent release is called Cactus
- OpenStack now has more than 60 partners in the ecosystem. The recent big entrants into the fold are Cisco and Dell
- OpenStack now has between 150 to 170 developers contributing code
Some of my observations about the event are:
- Passion: One of the most interesting things that stood out in the event was the passion developers had towards OpenStack. Many developers I spoke with were confident that OpenStack is going to take off big time within the next 12-18 months. Their passion was truly infectious and bodes well for the project. Any open source project with so much passion in store is bound to succeed and I am confident OpenStack is on the right path
- Controversy: Ever since Rich Clarke left OpenStack, there was a lingering question on whether Rackspace will hijack the project at some point in time. I spoke with people from both Rackspace and the OpenStack developer community. Rackspace’s only response was “See our track record and trust us based on it”. Even though I am not comfortable with the “Trust Us” slogan from a company whose only aim is to maximize the profits for their shareholders, I don’t see anything in their record that will force me to not take them on face value. The developers (including those who are not on Rackspace payroll) seem to be pretty comfortable with the current arrangement. After attending the event, I also don’t see any reason to disrupt the existing arrangement. With more and more companies joining the partner ecosystem and the Apache license for the code, there are no immediate dangers to the open source spirit/objective. Since the project is still in the early stages, Rackspace’s leadership may even be critical for the long term success of the project. Having said that, I would personally welcome any move that makes the project truly independent of Rackspace
- StackOps: One of the interesting find in this conference was a tiny little company from Spain called StackOps. If I have to describe StackOps in a simplistic way, I would say “StackOps is to OpenStack what Ubuntu was for Linux”. StackOps makes deploying OpenStack cloud seamless. Anyone can download the ISO image of the distribution from their website and have an OpenStack cloud running in 8-10 minutes. Keep an eye on this startup. They are going to play a critical role in taking OpenStack to more places than even Rackspace and other ecosystem partners
- Network as a Service: Cisco’s proposal for NaaS and the other existing proposal was merged and, even though there are some disagreements over how various components should be put together to offer NaaS, they are on track to include some code in the upcoming Diablo release. The Network Service project, whenever it is ready, is going to be very important for future enterprise adoption of OpenStack. This will also enable service providers to offer public cloud services that will suit the needs of the enterprise customers. An interesting project to watch in the coming months
- ScaleUp: ScaleUp Cloud (formerly a cloud infrastructure provider and see previous CloudAve coverage) announced their partnership with StackOps to offer ScaleUpNow, a cloud management platform with self service storefront for OpenStack. With ScaleUp and StackOps, anyone can build a cloud from bare metal in few minutes with a few clicks
- CloudBees: CloudBees (previous CloudAve coverage), the Java PaaS provider founded in 2010, announced support for OpenStack and VMware vSphere. Previously, CloudBees announced that their platform was available on top of different public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and others. With this announcement, it is possible to run CloudBees [email protected] on OpenStack private clouds. This will help them attract more enterprise customers who are still not ready to put their applications and data on public clouds
- Database as a Service: Few days before the event, Rackspace announced Project RedDwarf, Database as a Service. The idea is to create a database service, similar to Amazon RDS, which will be tightly integrated to OpenStack compute. It will be interesting to see how this project evolves
- Glaring Absence: Regular readers of this blog know pretty well that I unabashedly promote OpenStack here. Even before I spoke with OpenStack folks during the last OSCON, I heard from Cloud.com about how interesting OpenStack is and how it will completely change the dynamics of federated cloud landscape. Interestingly, Cloud.com was not visible at this event. I haven’t spoken to either OpenStack or Cloud.com about it but it will be interesting to see why they were not visibly present in this event
Conclusion
There is lot of momentum in the OpenStack project. Even though the compute code is not ready for production level deployment yet, there is widespread anticipation among the developers and ecosystem partners that enterprises will wholeheartedly embrace OpenStack whenever the compute project is production ready. With proposals like Network as a Service and Authentication as a Service, I don’t see why enterprises will not like what they are going to see in the OpenStack project. 2012 will be the year of large scale OpenStack adoption.
Related articles
- Poll: Is OpenStack Now More Attractive Following the Amazon Web Services Outage? (readwriteweb.com)
- OpenStack Cactus Adds Some Interesting Features (cloudave.com)
- Over Concerns About Openness, OpenStack Founder Leaves Rackspace (readwriteweb.com)
- Cisco aims network code at ‘Linux kernel for the cloud’ (go.theregister.com)
- OpenStack Opens Up Voting Process (nytimes.com)
- Update: The Future Path of Rackspace’s Public Cloud Products (rackspace.com)
- Cisco and OpenStack (blogs.cisco.com)
- OpenStack – an open source cloud platform (enterpriseirregulars.com)
Once correction on this point:
“Ever since Rich Clarke[sic] left OpenStack, there was a lingering question on whether Rackspace will hijack the project at some point in time.”
Rick Clark has not left the OpenStack community–perhaps you meant to say “left Rackspace”? While Rick did leave his job at Rackspace for a position at Cisco recently, he is still very much involved with OpenStack. He was present at the Design Summit & Conference, holds a seat on the OpenStack Project Policy Board, and was very active in several sessions during the summit (including the Network as a Service talks–he is even credited with coming up with “Donabe” as the name for the NetContainers concept).
Yes, he was there from Cisco. I was talking about Rich leaving his leadership position at OpenStack to take a role from Cisco side.