Three and a half years after launch, OpenStack is growing faster than ever. Initially regarded as just another cloud experiment, the platform has emerged as the de facto operating system for massively scalable open environments, garnering hundreds of corporate backers and thousands of individual contributors along the way. The attendance figures from last week’s OpenStack Enterprise Forum at the Computer History Museum are further testament to the community’s continued determination to bring the project into mainstream IT.

By the time moderator and Gartner research vice president Lydia Leong went through the meeting agenda, the event received more than 2.2 million impressions on Twitter and all the seats were taken, according to SiliconANGLE founding CEO host John Furrier. Appearing on theCUBE’s opening session alongside Wikibon co-founder Dave Vellante, he noted that the buzz around OpenStack is undeniable.

“One of the things that’s obviously clear from my data is that the OpenStack enterprise conversation is significant,” Furrier tells Vellante, referring to both the number of participants on-site and the surrounding social media activity. The industry is keeping a close watch on the platform, he explains, with vendors like all-flash appliance maker SolidFire actively pursuing a role in the ecosystem as part of an effort to capitalize on growing adoption.

OpenStack is gaining considerable steam, but there’s still a long way to go before it’s ready for enterprise primetime. Furrier sees automation and scalability as the top priorities for the community, followed by the need to build a cohesive vision for private, public and hybrid cloud computing. Vellante mentions that Cloudscaling founding CEO Randy Bias expressed doubts about OpenStack becoming a threat to Amazon in the #OEForum thread on CrowdChat, but other thought leaders in the ecosystem have different views. Leong for instance thinks that the project will emerge as an important enabler for DevOps and next-generation virtualization.

To view the full #OEForum Intro with Vellante and Furrier, click on the link below.