The Case of the Proliferating OpenStack Distros
What do Dell Computer, Red Hat, SuSE, Cloudscaling, Piston Cloud, Cisco, and StackOPS all have in common? They each have their very own OpenStack distribution, and this is potentially a major problem for the nascent OpenStack development community.
Based on the attendance at the October 2012 Folsom Design Summit, it is clear that OpenStack has the potential to be a real game changer in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) industry. The OpenStack Foundation has been favorably compared to its Linux and Apache predecessors as “an advanced example of open source governance,” according to Jonathan Bryce, the Foundation’s executive director.
That is all well and good, but it seems that a growing number of companies are not sticking with the main (or the so-called trunk) OpenStack program and making the decision to fork off their own distributions for sale to their customers. Soon, if OpenStack follows the same development path as Linux, there will be hundreds of distributions with subtly different features only noticeable to hardcore Linux kernel engineers and just plain confusing to the majority of the user community.
Since there is no real dominant market leader yet and the code base is still relatively unstable, each vendor is jumping in and trying to build a stable enterprise-ready OpenStack platform. While there are valid reasons for taking this approach, each new distribution has a net negative effect on the overall community because it can be seen as a distraction from the real work that needs to be done to stabilize and consolidate the underlying code base.
During the Analysts View of OpenStack panel at the Summit, Krishnan Subramanian argued that there was a perception in the enterprise that the major OpenStack vendors are running the show, and that transparency is important.
On the technology side, which distribution becomes the de facto enterprise standard is important because these customers are used to the Red Hat subscription-based support model. This translates to a requirement for an OpenStack distribution to be transparent to the user, stable, and as close to the main development trunk as possible—a tall order indeed given the current state of the code base.
For the cognoscenti who appreciate the subtle differences between the distributions, more power to you. For the rest of us, this smacks more of marketing hype, a way to create vendor lock-in where it doesn’t belong, an attempt to stabilize the code base—or some combination of all three.
At this early stage in the development cycle, such obvious attempts to grab market share do not seem to fit into the true spirit of the open source community. What do you think?
