In a preview of OpenStack Summit Austin 2016 earlier this year, a number of hosts from theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, joined tech enthusiasts and experts worldwide to discuss OpenStack’s past, present, and future.

Changing Expectations

Brian Gracely, lead cloud computing analyst at Wikibon and theCUBE cohost, spurred one of the most active discussions with the question, “What’s the biggest misperception about OpenStack in the market today?”

Responses ranged from the myth that “one needs a large bench to adopt OpenStack” to confusion about what, exactly, expectations for a finished “product” should look like from such a broad, ambitious project.

Productizing

Kenneth Hui, senior technical marketing manager and technology evangelist at Rackspace, Inc., commented, “I think there is still some misunderstanding about project vs. product. Users expect the project to be a polished product.” Though Gracely argued that it’s “not an unreasonable thing for users to expect.” Kenneth countered that while it may be right to “expect the core/kernel to be polished and stable … productizing it is often a bigger task.”

Steve Gordon, principal product manager at Red Hat, Inc., seemed to agree that OpenStack can and should be different things for different users, since joining an open-source project and contributing back is a much bigger endeavor than simply purchasing a product. “Consuming directly from the open-source Firehose comes with its own challenges,” he said. “Some operators are able to manage this and contribute back, and we should applaud that, but it’s not for everyone.”

Competing containers?

Another misconception surrounds OpenStack’s relationship to containers. Mark Collier, COO and cofounder of the OpenStack Foundation commented that one major issue is that many people think “containers are somehow competitive with OpenStack, when in fact they are just another useful tool that can and will be adopted up and down the stack. Kolla, for example, is a project to put OpenStack services into containers.”

Gracely agreed, saying that “the PaaS companies are fighting the same misperception. Containers are a thing. Operating them is a much more complicated thing. Many options available.” This is expected to be a topic of conversation at the Summit.

Educating IT

Finally, Brian Gracely commented that he was surprised to see that even this year, major vendors are still having to offer “OpenStack 101 presentations to the market.” Collier said this makes more sense from outside the cloud world.

“I think that from within the cloud world we have known what cloud (and OpenStack) are for years, but when you get outside that bubble you realize a huge amount of IT isn’t on any kind of cloud. So the 101 talks are still necessary,” Collier said.

This lack of “cloud awareness” can be a challenge given that one of OpenStack’s top business drivers is standardizing “on the same open platform … that powers a global network of public and private clouds,” according to an April 2016 user survey posted by Stu Miniman, principal research contributor at Wikibon and theCUBE cohost (full survey here).

Enterprise Adoption

This question of business drivers plays into another key topic of discussion, raised by Hui: “A big theme in the past two Summits is enterprise adoption, particularly enterprise apps,” he said. “Where are we with that in Mitaka?” (OpenStack Mitaka is the 13th release of open-source software for building clouds.)

Collier responded with several examples. “I recently learned of a large bank running Oracle on OpenStack in production, and SAP is also doing a lot to support OpenStack,” he said. “SAP is doing a keynote in Austin, in fact.” Additionally, “OPNFV [Open Platform for NFV Project, Inc.] has been working in the community to help OpenStack evolve to meet the needs of the telecom industry.” He added that “collaboration is key” to this evolution.

Telecom’s Embrace

Given that OpenStack has seen rapid adoption in the telecom industry, Hui asked, “What are the reasons that telcos have embraced OpenStack so quickly for NFV [network functions virtualization]?”

Gordon suggested that “Key NFV drivers include agility/flexibility and align well with high-level OpenStack design and focus of providing public APIs with many swappable back-end options.”

Russell Bryant, technical director, OpenStack at Red Hat, added that the kind of infrastructure OpenStack offers matches up well with telecom needs “across all verticals. operational efficiency, common platform and APIs,” etc.

Good timing has also been a factor, according to Sriram Subramanian, founder and CEO of CloudDon. “Right when they are looking to refresh, OpenStack use cases gave confidence,” he said.

Perhaps most importantly, according to Collier, “Telecom is a trillion-dollar industry that is facing a dramatically more competitive market. The need to move away from fixed function hardware to software on x86 is pressing. In fact, it can’t come fast enough to get to 5G and support IoT.” All of this has contributed to the adoption of OpenStack by companies like Comcast and Time Warner Cable, and has in turn led to the evolution of the project to meet their needs.

“Core” or “Big Tent?”

Miniman brought up a question of labeling: “Last year there was a lot of discussion of “Core” or “Big Tent” — what does this mean and what is the update?”

Bryant said the two are entirely separate concepts. “The technical community has embraced an inclusive governance structure (big tent), while the foundation does work to define ‘core’ for trademark program purposes,” he said.

Gordon suggested that this is both a good and a bad thing. “The big tent is about being more inclusive of ‘who is OpenStack’ in terms of development process, but less useful than previous designations in terms of navigating,” he said. “Hence the introduction of tags and the project navigator.”

Hui asked, “Will the tags help users to determine what projects are mature enough for production?” Gordon said the answer is essentially “maybe.” “The navigator rolls a number of tags and survey metrics into a maturity ‘score’ — still not really granular enough for operators to navigate IMO.”

Eglė Sigler, member of the Board of Directors at OpenStack and principal architect at Rackspace, said, “DefCore sets base requirements by defining 1) capabilities, 2) code and 3) must-pass tests for all OpenStack products.”

See the full CrowdChat transcript below:

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