OpenStack (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
As I travel to San Diego to attend the OpenStack Summit (Fall 2012 edition), I am thinking about what to expect from the event. I wrote about the enthusiasm I saw in the community after the April 2012 Summit. Even though I expect to see the same (more) enthusiasm in the community, I also want to hear more from the community, OpenStack users, etc.. I thought I will summarize my thoughts in this post as I travel in a legacy infrastructure (an aircraft with no wifi).
- I expect to see the enthusiasm in the community to be stronger than ever before. Now that the Foundation is in place, board “elected” and more and more companies jumping on-board, there is going to be lots of excitement and optimism in the community. However, I do hope that the community use this energy to make sure the code is more reliable and can be deployed in production environments. If the community overlooks this industry need and shoves it under the carpet, it will come back to hurt them sooner than later. My expectation # 1: I want to hear that code is production ready.
- Even though I have heard many stories about OpenStack being used in test-dev environments, I want to hear customer stories about production deployments inside the enterprises. We do have Rackspace, HP and others running OpenStack on the service provider side. But I want to hear about enterprise use cases. My expectation #2: Solid case studies on the use of OpenStack in the enterprises.
- The openness mantra in the OpenStack community is definitely marketing to certain extent but it is not meaningless as some would want you to believe (this is a different topic for another discussion). However, maintaining higher levels of interoperability is in the best interests of the ecosystem. I want to hear from service providers (No marketing BS please as I always see through them most of the times) about what they have done to ensure interoperability as they go about building differentiating features on top of OpenStack core. My expectation #3: Want to hear from ecosystem players on what they are doing to maintain interoperability by cutting off the need to have third party higher order services.
- One of the biggest criticism I hear from enterprise community is that OpenStack is difficult to deploy and manage. Yes, there are some distributions focussed on solving this problem. I really want to hear more from them and, possibly, case studies on the same. My expectation #4: More case studies on ease of deployment.
- Whether we like it or not, infrastructure services are going to get masked by higher order services. We have VMware working with OpenStack ecosystem on helping support their CloudFoundry framework on OpenStack. I would like to hear from OpenStack community on their long term roadmap to evolve with this technological evolution. My expectation #5: What is the future of OpenStack five years from now?
These are some of my expectations going into the event. I hope there is more substance and less marketing.
(Disclosure: OpenStack is paying my travel and stay)
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