With all of the IT attendees coming to the 2016 OpenStack Summit in Austin, TX, it’s easy to forget that the event once struggled to find its place and draw interest. However, that awareness of its hard start has kept the OpenStack Foundation looking for ways to innovate and stay ahead of the game.

Kyle MacDonald, founding board director of the OpenStack Foundation, strategic advisor and consultant for Big Switch Networks, Inc. and Mirantis, Inc., joined Stu Miniman (@stu) and Brian Gracely (@bgracely), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to talk about some of those past struggles, as well as what was anticipated for future challenges and opportunities.

OpenStack’s history and challenges

MacDonald was thrilled and humbled by the success of the OpenStack convention, saying, “I think it’s far exceeded what I expected would have happened in such a short span of time.”

He shared some of the event’s history, from its brainstorming phase to something of a rivalry with CloudStack, and addressed some of the ways in which enterprises that had once seen OpenStack’s broadening of available functionality as a threat or challenge had come to be deeply involved with their operations.

Among the other topics covered, MacDonald noted that many of the big tech companies, not just the ones dealing directly in storage or infrastructure, were being made uncomfortable by how quickly and widely the move of workloads to the cloud was being embraced. However, he also pointed out that for those which were aiming to deliver some sort of non-niche service, the road was a rocky one.

“With all of the different ecosystems, there have not been a lot of companies that have actually been able to go from that early-stage company and get it to the next level with very broad adoption … I think that as a result, we’re not seeing companies come out [and announce their growth rates] in the DevOps world,” he said.

Private cloud entrenchment

Moving on, MacDonald addressed some of the broader issues applying to the convention’s attendees, with a prime one being that, as he said, “We need to see a large OpenStack public cloud presence focus. … We’re still too much in the private cloud market.”

Though he felt that future developments, possibly encouraged by OpenStack’s availability, would address this problem, MacDonald still cautioned against blithely assuming that things would work themselves out.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of OpenStack Summit — Austin. And make sure to weigh in during theCUBE’s live coverage at the event by joining in on CrowdChat.

Photo by SiliconANGLE