After Three Years, Is OpenStack Still on Track?
It's been a week since the eighth biannual OpenStack Summit Hong Kong, and the jet lag is finally wearing off. It's time to sit back and assess the progress of the largest open source project ever undertaken.
There are many exciting new projects planned for the upcoming Icehouse release, but there are also some troubling developments as the project moves from being an incubated alternate cloud toolkit to a serious production-ready platform. Is OpenStack still in hype cycle overdrive, or is it finally ready for prime time?
On the plus side, the momentum is still going strong. With 30 percent of the more than 3,500 attendees from the United States, the hardcore Stackers were more than willing to literally go to the other side of the world to gather for the well-balanced mix of design sessions, case studies, tutorials, and research presentations.
More than 45 percent of attendees were from Asia, which isn't a big revelation. But the rapid adoption by the Chinese government and companies, highlighted during the two keynotes, caught many by surprise. For the 65 percent who were first timers, there was a lot to take in and learn about the project and the ecosystem of tools and services that has grown around it.
The vendor hall was the busiest it has ever been. First timers, such as the folks from Stratus Technologies who were demonstrating OpenStack-based high availability solutions, were just as mobbed as stalwart Canonical, where you could order ice cream sundaes using their new version of JuJu Cloud deployment tools. IBM, which had been sitting on the fence for several years, finally came out in support of OpenStack in a big way—with a keynote presentation.
Some of the projects planned for incorporation with the Icehouse release include:
Other so-called OpenStack-related projects, which is the community term for emerging components that might or might not eventually become part of the core code base, include:
- Tuskar—an installer utility designed to give administrators the ability to control how and where OpenStack services are deployed across the datacenter
- TripleO Deployment (OpenStack on OpenStack)—uses Tuskar to allow administrators to install OpenStack on top of OpenStack baremetal installations; intended to improve automation and provide more elasticity and flexible use of resources
- Solum—a PaaS supported by Red Hat and Docker
Like previous OpenStack Summits, the overwhelming majority of attendees were developers and software engineers, with a smaller mix of operations folks. Sessions on security were still scarce, and the state of the SDN (Software Defined Networking) project Neutron is messy enough to get its own separate column. But documentation is finally being taken seriously—thanks to Anne Gentile and her many helpers.
