OpenStack is becoming one of the most admired actors in the public and private cloud industry. Started as an open source project in a joint project led by Rackspace and NASA, today this open source cloud platform is backed by more than 200 vendors worldwide and around 16.000 developers in 150 countries. The OpenStack Juno Summit, last week in Atlanta, was a source of many new and exciting announcements, from both vendors and the OpenStack Foundation itself.
OpenStack Marketplace aims to end confusion
OpenStack Marketplace is probably the most important announcement of the summit: the goal is providing a complete online directory of all the distributions, tools and services offered in the OpenStack world by different vendors. From training to Consulting, the OpenStack Marketplace is the place to find solutions for companies and professionals.
The OpenStack Distributions War
Every vendor involved in the OpenStack Foundation is now working with its own distribution of OpenStack. RedHat is very active and rumors say that the company is working with aggressive strategies to get more customers on its distribution. It’s probably only the beginning: HP has a billion commitment to OpenStack for the next two years and the same will probably happen with Oracle, now a Corporate Sponsor of the foundation. Canonical is already claiming its leadership on OpenStack.
Most of these vendors will try to be leaders in the private cloud space but it’s also very clear how some of them will use this approach to also offer a public cloud infrastructure. That’s the case of HP.
With more and more enterprises that are implementing OpenStack around the world, I’m expecting that this war will get worse in the next months with more vendors trying to sell their own OpenStack solution: at the end of the day, they will end up facing competitors like Microsoft, VMware, and Amazon.
OpenStack supporters used to say that this open source platform is the best alternative to lock-in oriented platforms like Amazon Web Services. It seems that the future could be exactly the opposite: with more and more vendors sponsoring their own distributions, it’s likely to become a world where you will get support from a vendor only if you are using that specification distribution. The first step to a lock-in strategy to retain customers.
How OpenStack will compete with AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud
I think that the next 6-12 months will be the right time to understand if OpenStack will be a serious competitor for Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google in the cloud computing industry.
My view is that OpenStack will be the most important technology in the private cloud market but will need more development and less confusion to succeed with a public cloud approach.
Training will be an important element for OpenStack to succeed in the public cloud market. AWS and Azure have already a solid base of developers that are learning how to use their platforms, OpenStack needs a similar approach that should be independent of the single vendors.
A recap of the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta
Let me finish this post with a video that goes through all the news of the summit.
