The recent OpenStack Summit 2015 in Vancouver was a great success with 6000+ attendees who convened to celebrate the community’s progress. A key point of this summit was to showcase OpenStack doing real enterprise production IT. Despite immaturity in some areas, OpenStack continues to disprove naysayers by delivering on the promise of an open source private cloud. Kilo is out now and there are even more improvements in stability and manageability. No software is perfect and OpenStack is no exception. Like other transformational software movements, we can not rest on our laurels, but must keep moving to make progress.
OpenStack is now seen by a growing number of CIOs as a place to land all new applications and a future home for their existing ones. Eleven Fortune 100 firms – including Best Buy, BMW and Walmart – talked about what they are doing in production deployments. No surprise that Walmart, a global retail giant, is not turning to AWS for their infrastructure. Walmart chose OpenStack as a platform for its journey to cloud because they see it as best of the breed and it enables their vision of vendor neutrality going forward.
But make no mistake, deploying OpenStack is still not easy. Compounding this is a shortage of experienced engineers and architects. In response, EMC launched a Reference Architecture Program with three leading OpenStack Vendors: Canonical, Mirantis and Red Hat (coming soon). Each architecture has been optimized to create a templated, repeatable process for deploying their respective OpenStack distributions with EMC storage products. We will continue to expand the program throughout 2015 with VMware and other OpenStack partners. More insight into EMC’s commitment to OpenStack can be found at Dorian Naveh’s blog or Adam Water’s interview on theCube
In order to drive the conversation around improving OpenStack and softening its rough edges, I took a firm but honest stance on the project’s current and future state in my bi-annual SOTSv.4 presentation.
It’s easy to lose sight of how far OpenStack and the community has come over the past few years. Despite my firm and honest POV in the SOTSv.4 presentation, OpenStack IS making great progress. A major effort on the part of the community is the multi-release roadmap being driven by the Product Management Working Group. This is exciting because it shows we can look beyond a six month release cycle towards longer term goals and measuring incremental progress. You can get a glimpse of what’s next in OpenStack in this Roadmap presentation.
Growing pains aside, international banks such as Wells Fargo, major car manufacturers such as BMW, top scientific organizations like CERN, and many other leading organizations are voting in favor of open source by adopting OpenStack, the world’s leading private cloud platform.
Ultimately OpenStack is about more than code or APIs. It is about global community with a shared mission. Building on the momentum from OpenStack 2015 in Vancouver, there are no limits.
