John Furrier and Dave Vellante, theCUBE co-hosts, interviewed Jonathan Bryce, Executive Director with OpenStack, at the OpenStack & Enterprise Forum in Mountain View, California yesterday.

Asked to give an update on OpenStack and its milestones, Bryce reiterated the history he mentioned back at the panel hosted by Lydia Leong: “OpenStack is a project started three-and-a-half years ago and the Foundation is over a year old. A very big step in the growth and maturity of OpenStack was finding a long term, independent, vendor neutral home for it,” said Bryce.

Wrapping up 2013, while crunching the data, analyzing the number of people who have contributed code or the number of people who came to the summits, they realized that number more than doubled last year. Therefore, the state of OpenStack is “very much on the upswing and still in the early days.”

Speaking of the summits, Furrier wanted to know how they manage to balance the need for participation with avoiding tainted agendas.

“In some ways, that is a good problem to have,” thinks Bryce. “We spend a lot of time thinking how to make sure that everybody gets equal opportunity at everything we’re organizing in the community. As far as handling the sponsorships to the summits, it’s not just about putting up just another industry event, it’s about bringing the community together to get a lot of work done – so we actually limit the number of sponsors we have there, regardless of the money they want to pay or how big the company is. We try to make it a very fair process.”

Vellante noticed a caveat, where people might not properly distinguish between OpenStack the project, from OpenStack the products and solutions.

Putting an API on everything that runs in a data center

Refering to Jerry Chen’s definition of OpenStack (all things to all people, versus AWS which is one thing to all people), Vellante reached out to Bryce for comments.

“OpenStack is a very broad technology,” Bryce explained. “As for what it is trying to accomplish, OpenStack is putting an API on everything that runs in a data center – the compute, the storage, the networking – and it does that in a way that’s pluggable, so if you’re using commodity servers, traditional hardware, open compute, all of those things have OpenStack running.”

The technology is meant to put a standard interface on all the things that need to tun in a data center. That is a really valuable proposition, if you think about the additional scale, the additional flexibility, the automation and so on.

“Open technologies are a great thing in every market, believes Bryce. “Open Compute is at the layer below OpenStack, at the hardware layer, not just in terms of servers, but actually data center design, cooling, all the things that enable you to be able to run operational software like OpenStack and application software on top of that. The whole “open” is a great thing,” concluded Bryce.