Four years after launch, OpenStack is finally starting to see the first user communities forming, according to the head of the industry consortium that oversees the development of the fast-emerging cloud framework. In his latest appearance on theCUBE during a recent community gathering at the Computer History Museum, OpenStack Foundation executive director hailed the trend as an important turning point in the evolution of the project.

In the early days of the initiative, he reflected, the ecosystem consisted mostly of developers caught in the allure of a fledgling open-source platform with the lofty goal of disrupting the enterprise status quo. Once it became clear that OpenStack holds the very real potential to realize its objective, vendors started to join the fray en masse with products and services that placed the project on the accelerating growth project it’s racing along today.

And now, those offerings are attracting paying customers who Bryce said are emerging as a source of invaluable input for the broader community filling the missing piece in the open-source development puzzle. “It’s the piece that is extremely critical to keep us focused in the right direction,” he said. “There is nothing like a user to say the obvious thing and tell you what you’re doing wrong and what you’re doing great.”

Growth pains

The staggering increase in the adoption of OpenStack is adding a lot of momentum to the project, but it’s also creating practical problems that are already beginning to weigh down on Bryce’s foundation.

Most pressing of them all is the need to manage the growing amount of code submitted from the ecosystem, which he told theCUBE hosts John Furrier and Jeff Frick is outpacing the capacity of the systems put in place to handle the task. And that’s just one aspect of the broader challenge the OpenStack Foundation: rallying a highly fragmented community numbering more than 3,000 contributors scattered across over 100 countries.

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Big or small, are all welcome

The ecosystem, in its present state, is an assorted mix of independent developers with an affinity for open-source software and vendors hoping for an early start on the next big thing in enterprise computing. Some believe that the widening involvement of the latter crowd may stifle the evolution of OpenStack, but Bryce is of the opinion opposite is true. The way he sees it, the more players in the ring, the better.

“What we’re talking about is changing the way all IT is done: how every server, every storage device, every networking device and every data center is managed. That’s a huge opportunity and there’s not gonna be one approach that works,” Bryce explained, highlighting the need for a variety of solutions to address the different requirements of the fast-growing OpenStack user base.

The corporate contributors to the project are also playing a much more direct role in bringing the project forward, he continued. While smaller members of the community tend to focus on the bleeding edge features that set OpenStack apart from the traditional systems it’s trying to replace, the likes of IBM Corp. and Red Hat Inc. have set aside resources to tackle the mundane but equally burning issues outside the spotlight. That includes everything from testing code for bugs to writing documentation.

Developers, developers, developers

There’s no denying that the list of contributors to OpenStack has ballooned in size over the last few years, but the number of developers writing code designed to run on the platform remains fairly limited. That discrepancy may strike as odd at first, but Bryce said that there’s a perfectly logical explanation behind the gap. “We’re four years into this and when we started out we had very raw technology,” he pointed out. “You gotta get that technology baked before you can attract the user base that’s going to operate clouds and you gotta have those clouds operating before you can have developers coding against them.”

Those clouds are quickly turning into reality, he added, with several hosting providers already offering OpenStack-based based services and internal IT organizations slowly but surely following suit. To help developers tap that boom, Bryce’s foundation is offering free libraries and other resources aimed at making it easier to build applications for the platform. “In 2014, we’re really just getting to that point of having a wide variety of public cloud options and easy to install private cloud options that will attract those developers,” he summarized.