The latest OpenStack Summit has kicked off in Boston, with the Foundation naturally being tooled up with news and announcements for attendees.
Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, spoke of the ‘three Cs’ – capabilities, compliance, and cost – with organisations becoming more sophisticated in their approach to workload placement across public and private clouds.
Each of these Cs was exemplified by a company working with OpenStack in that area. GE Healthcare presented the benefits of their private cloud as a service in partnership with Rackspace for compliance, while the US Army Cyber School was cited for saving money through OpenStack. For capability, Verizon outlined how it was leveraging OpenStack for Virtual Network Solutions, a product which focuses on edge computing and the Internet of Things for compute, network, and storage.
The foundation also announced it had elected China Unicom and FiberHome Telecommunication technologies as gold members. The two companies both ‘demonstrate[d] OpenStack’s strategic value for networking and large-scale service providers’, the company said.
Recent headlines in the press have not been entirely kind to OpenStack. As reported by Fortune last month, Intel cut funding on an OpenStack initiative it launched alongside Rackspace, resulting in job losses for the latter.
Yesterday, Rackspace announced it was collaborating with Dell EMC to deliver OpenStack private clouds with the behemoth conglomerate providing the compute and storage side. Rackspace also took the opportunity to scotch the recent press cuttings in a blog post authored by Scott Crenshaw, SVP strategy and product.
“Clickbait headlines aside, the facts are clear: OpenStack deployments are growing,” he wrote. “It is becoming a standard cloud platform for corporations of all sizes, which are consistently growing their usage of OpenStack. That trend is [borne] out at Rackspace, where we’re seeing dramatic growth in our customers’ usage of OpenStack.”
Crenshaw cited a Forrester Research report from December last year which argued OpenStack had become a ‘de facto standard platform for the private cloud market’. While admitting the initiative had seen a couple of ‘false starts’, he added that those who were willing to take the plunge will reap rewards.
“OpenStack marks the point where open source infrastructure software became too complex to be delivered as traditional software distribution,” he wrote. “To successfully harness the power of open source innovation, the vast majority of users will consume open source infrastructure as a service, which is, after all, the way cloud was meant to be used.
“Some of the vendors who haven’t crossed this chasm are indeed exiting the OpenStack business. Rackspace’s billion server hours of OpenStack operational experience is probably an insurmountable lead,” Crenshaw added.
The negative headlines came amid a recent user survey from the foundation which said OpenStack was capturing 44% more deployments and input from 22% more organisations than one year previously. “Far from being in danger of demise, OpenStack has become the catalyst for a rich and vital transformation in the way the world consumes open source infrastructure,” said Crenshaw.
You can read the full Rackspace post here.
