OpenStack is a large area in technology, and many have found it to be like a giant vat of questions without a lot of clear answers. But many at the OpenStack Summit in Austin, TX, are discussing the “maturation” of OpenStack and how its actual uses can now be better understood.

“We’re seeing much more focus on ‘How do you actually operate this platform?’ and ‘How do you build the right operational tools?’ which is a sign of people really using it,” according to Jason McGee, IBM fellow, VP and CTO of the IBM Cloud Platform. McGee told Brian Gracely (@bgracely) and John Walls, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team during the summit, “We’re beyond the ‘What does it do?’ and into the ‘How do I run this efficiently and operate this?'”

McGee said that the customers he’s worked with who attempted to operate the OpenStack DIY quickly realized that it was an “expensive and complicated operation.” He said that running any kind of hybrid cloud platform is a “fundamentally more complex operation than running a Linux server or an app server.”

“The blast radius of failure is much bigger,” he said. “I mean you do that wrong, and you have 1,000 apps running on your platform, and you screw something up, you take 1,000 apps down.” He said the logical conclusion is that customers need to go with a trusted vendor. “To me, cloud is a service you deliver; it’s not a software.”

The wonders of Watson

While discussing the eternal end game of OpenStack, cloud and everything else in IT — the applications — McGee and hosts began discussing IBM’s Watson. McGee said, “What’s really interesting to me about Watson is how easy it is for an average developer to get access to just incredibly powerful capabilities.”

He added that video image processing and natural language processing used to be deeply complicated scientific processes, and they can now be performed in Watson in two minutes.

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