In their ongoing coverage of the O’Reilly fluent conference, John Furrier and Jeff Frick spoke with Hart Hoover in theCube. The three discussed the evolution of OpenStack, its agility across multiple platforms and common concerns for OpenStack customers. Furrier also describes Rackspace as pioneers of the DevOps movement and concludes by reviewing its overall contribution to the ecosystem.

OpenStack has allowed users to incorporate what Furrier calls “real software engineering” that goes beyond front-end development with pretty websites to more server side scripting. Hoover notes that OpenStack is evolving to meet demand.  He suggests that Rackspace has launched developer support, helping customers with code and how it touches infrastructure, in a way that is “very different from just re-starting Apache.”

Hoover highlights the agility of OpenStack that makes it useful to a range of client platforms.  Funnily enough he notes, OpenStack can even run on raspberry pies (as with an actual user in the UK) to a one-laptop-per-child PC. This flexibility truly reflects the power of an open cloud to run “anywhere on anything,” according to Hoover. OpenStack is also growing to bridge public and private clouds in a hybrid cloud environment.

Frick inquires about customer concerns for OpenStack. Hoover has observed that the “big ghost” for users is lock-in. Many customers are hesitant to be limited to one vedor. Hoover suggests, however, the power of OpenStack allows the “vendor lock-in” equation to go away.”

So, given the utility and growing success of OpenStack, Furrier asks why are analysts and “Wall Street” types simply not getting its potential? Hoover notes a major reason for this is Amazon was the first to market, which gave them a big advantage.  And, while he recognizes it may be “an audacious thing to say,” he believes “we’ll eventually eclipse them.” More to the point, Hoover notes: “Closed cloud days are numbered.”

To conclude, Furrier notes, Rackspace has gained a lot of halo effect with open cloud and helped “pioneer the DevOps movement” with the idea of “infrastructure as code.” Going forward, Hoover believes tools will be created to make it easy for “mom and pop shops” access to compute on a utility basis as technology becomes more democratic. Furrier suggests the work of technologists like Hoover show the significance of open source developments in “not just contributing code, but building out the ecosystem.”