Interoperability and support from major developers are two of the major issues being addressed this week at the OpenStack Summit taking place in Barcelona, Spain. While OpenStack-powered deployments seem more popular than ever among enterprise users, the summit is taking place amid cutbacks in resources from groups like HPE, which has been a major contributor to the project.
OpenStack is an open source cloud computing project launched by NASA and Rackspace in 2010 and designed to allow organizations to build their own private clouds. Although only a few years old, private clouds powered by OpenStack technology are expected to generate $5 billion in revenue by 2020, according to a paper released by 451 Research ahead of the summit.
Private Exceeding Public
“To date, the majority of revenue has come from the service providers offering multi-tenant IaaS, but we expect OpenStack private cloud revenue to exceed public cloud revenue by 2019,” 451 Research wrote in its report. “Overall revenue is still relatively small compared to market leaders such as VMware in private clouds and Amazon Web Services in public clouds.”
While OpenStack deployments may still be dwarfed by the likes of VMware and AWS (Amazon Web Services), they are quickly catching up to those of major companies, such as Verizon, Volkswagen, and Walmart, using the platform to deploy their own clouds. Mid-market enterprises are also increasingly using the platform, with 65 percent of companies responding to 451 Research’s survey consisting of between 1,000 and 10,000 employees.
“Our research in aggregate indicates enterprises globally are moving beyond using OpenStack for science projects and basic test and development to workloads that impact the bottom line,” said Al Sadowski, research vice president with 451 Research, in the paper.
Nevertheless, compatibility between different OpenStack distributions remains a point of contention. Some organizations have expressed frustration because OpenStack is difficult to use, and they have pushed the project to adopt more upgrades more quickly.
But that means the project must either engage in the painstaking process of ensuring that requested improvements work across all distributions or allow enterprises to create more purpose-built versions of the platform. While the latter would allow the project to evolve faster, the risk of interoperability problems between different versions still exists.
Interoperability Challenge
To address the issue, this year’s OpenStack Summit featured an Interoperability Challenge, a live demo in which developers ran the same software across different OpenStack distributions. The foundation also announced a growing number of verified “OpenStack Powered” products in the marketplace, with 46 distributions, services and public clouds now passing interoperability tests.
Meanwhile, Internap Corporation, an infrastructure services provider, announced at the summit that it would be joining the project as an infrastructure donor. The company said it will provide cloud resources to the foundation to support the automated testing of OpenStack projects.
But there have been some dark clouds among the mostly positive news. HPE, which has been a major contributor to the project, has laid off most of its development team. The company still supports the technology through its Helion OpenStack product, but the cutbacks come as something of a blow.
