Continuing SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE live coverage of the VMworld Conference in San Francisco, John Furrier welcomed Josh McKenty and Joe Arnold to discuss the ever maturing OpenStack platform. Furrier began by noting how OpenStack has really resonated with enterprises.

McKenty, the co-founder and CTO of Piston Cloud, elaborated on that fact saying, “We have joint customers with every ecosystem vendor.” It is that freedom that organizations find alluring with OpenStack. “We are taking the silos down but we aren’t limiting the vendor choices.”

The competition field of the future is going to be between OpenStack and Amazon. Providers like VMware have clearly stood with OpenStack as their platform of choice. One reason is as the infrastructure continues to get bigger and bigger, companies behind OpenStack are not applying multi-tools as a multiple solution. They are able to develop and implement the right tools for specific job requirements.

Arnold, the CEO of SwiftStack, sees the future in the private cloud. “We are collectively making it so any operator can get up and running with any infrastructure.” This shows the old model that required Linux downloads is an outdated model. OpenSource is obviously the future.

Watch the interview with McKenty and Arnold in its entirety below:

 

For private cloud to take greater hold, you have to have ease of management operations, Arnold stated. Organizations want to bring their storage loads in house while allowing other, less-proprietary operations to reside in the public cloud.

Furrier, in a question posed to many professionals in theCUBE interviews, asked McKenty and Arnold if they could provide their own definition of what is a private cloud. McKenty felt an analogy to water was the best way to explain the concept. “Everyone has a hot water tank in their home. You don’t want your own well…but keeping [the water] hot, you want that in your house.”

With big players like IBM, HP and Dell standing squarely behind OpenStack, Arnold commented, “At the core, all of us are building at the foundation. That is OpenSource. This allows everyone to contribute to drive it forward.”

And enterprise likes the platform because, ultimately, they don’t want to be locked into a single platform. McKenty added, “Eighty percent of our large clients are using CloudFoundry on top of OpenStack. The dashboard we are relying on is unified.”

It was this recognition that led Furrier to inquire about the current state of the hypervisor debate. According to McKenty, the OpenSource community is currently looking at adding Docker to OpenStack. This shows how the entire cloud movement is being driven by devops. OpenStack allows everyone to work with each of the aspects necessary to advance the technology.

Summing up the session, McKenty said, “We’ve got customers happy with OpenStack and that is the final proof point to say we are not a standards body. We have rough concensus and working code.”