For this week’s Best of theCUBE series we have an interview with Rackspace’s Ken Hui, Open Cloud Architect and Cody Bunch, Principal Architect at Rackspace Private Cloud from VTUG Winter Warmer 2014 at Gillette Stadium. The two gave one of the keynotes at VTUG this year, discussing what OpenStack is and what you need to know as an administrator. The OpenStack vs. OpenStack alongside VMware debate is one they hoped to educate the VTUG crowd, and we heard firsthand what those lessons are.

Bunch feels there are mixed feelings in the community regarding this debate. OpenStack has a need for enterprise vendors or “non pure” contributors to give the open source initiative more robust and enterprise-grade features. But when you have the “old guard” sniffing around OpenStack, from IBM to HP, there is an immediate level of pretension.

theCUBE host, Dave Vellante came out swinging, asking Hui and Bunch point blank if OpenStack was ready for prime time. Ken Hui responded,

I would say OpenStack is ready for prime time…I would caveat that by saying if you want something that runs out of the box completely and you don’t have to do anything around it, OpenStack is probably not quite there yet. I would argue VMware is not quite there yet either. What I often talk about with customers is, differentiate between OpenStack the project and the products that are built using the OpenStack project code. The project itself can be a bit raw and doesn’t necessarily have the pieces today that you’d want in a full deployment. But a lot of vendors like Rackspace, but also like Red Hat, assigned to package things, take that raw project open source code and productize and wrap other tools around it to make it more production ready.

Bunch agreed and added that the pace of contributions is picking up for OpenStack. He went on to say that the current focus is OpenStack is very developer driven, but what you’re seeing more and more of is established companies, who know about operationalizing a data center (Red Hat, IBM, Rackspace), are contributing back more and more code.

Automation is key to productizing OpenStack

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Bunch should know, he wrote the book on OpenStack…literally. He coauthored a book titled OpenStack Cloud Computing Cookbook – Second Edition with Kevin Jackson. What did he say are the ingredients?

A lot of patience, a little ESXi admin knowledge and build from there. OpenStack is a set of loosely coupled projects. You pick and choose what you want to deploy in your cloud, or if you’re deploying from an established – vendors have an opinion of deploying OpenStack.

The panel agrees that a cornerstone to OpenStack’s success is automation. In our world today, the only way to scale out IT is to automate the process. Hui and Bunch believe that the two steps for practitioners in the community are to automate the deployment of OpenStack and then bring automation into OpenStack itself. However, neither were ready to tackle the question of whether practitioners were ready for automation. There is a bit of awkward smiling until Hui takes the conversation a different direction and dives deeper into why automation is the key.

Hui tells a story as an example:

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Before — I could do 10 projects a year and generate revenue. (Then automation was introduced.)

Now — I can do 50 projects in the same amount of time with the same amount of resources. If 10 of those project generate revenue, my percentage of success is lower, but my total revenue intake is much great for the same amount of expenditure.

Risk decreases, expenditure doesn’t change, project revenue increases.

Automation improves productivity and profitability while decreasing failure costs. Vellante is very choice with his words in saying that we are almost at a tipping point where it is inevitable that you will not be able to scale your business without that level of automation. Hui and Bunch agree, in full.

AWS vs. OpenStack Rackspace Open Cloud

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AWS is the mental model for the cloud, with 3-4 billion in revenue in 2013. Vellante looped in a comment brought up by Jerry Chen on theCUBE at AWS Re:Invent 2013 this past November. In interview, Chen said, “OpenStack I feel is like everything to everybody, all things to all people. Where Amazon is one thing to all people.”

When asked for a response to Chen’s comment, Hui and Bunch were both again noticeably lost for words. Hui eventually chimed in and said that comparing AWS to OpenStack wasn’t an apples to apples comparison, and that AWS to Rackspace’s public cloud would be a better comparison.

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• OpenStack scaling  + interoperability 

So how does OpenStack scale? How does it reach market saturation? Does OpenStack need a single leader? Does Open need to better determine core requirements?

“There are several projects under way within the community to establish what that baseline is, to establish what running a OpenStack core is, and what core represents and in order to say you’re running an public OpenStack you have to meet certain capability requirements – all are being defined as we speak,” said Bunch.

A key differentiator for OpenStack is that, as OpenStack-based products come out, the code does not change. No matter what deployment tool, monitoring tool, or billing tool you use, the underlying code is the same. That means at worst, portions of all OpenStack products will be interoperable. It is mission critical to OpenStack, and part of its vision, that interoperability reaches its highest levels possible. And interoperability doesn’t end inside OpenStack either. Interoperability between OpenStack and AWS is essential to the survival of both.

Vellante summarized it best: every market, even ketchup, has choices. Without choices there is no innovation. Randy Bias, CEO of Cloud Scaling, said at VTUG Winter Warmer 2014 this week that OpenStack and its community should adopt the AWS API, a cooperative approach he’s been promoting for some time. In true OpenStack form, Bunch replied to first hearing Bias’ comment:

Being that OpenStack is a community-driven project, if the community has enough interest in it then it will come to be. There will be code contributions to back that up. There is always going to be value is some compatibility between the two, if you don’t have a basic set of provisioning APIs that are compatible or so across the two you won’t have the ability to experiment with work loads in the public cloud and migrate them in and visa versa. Or it makes the development of tooling that is multi cloud aware much more complex.

Open tack is built by the community, for the community. Do you think OpenStack is ready for prime time in 2014? Hui and Bunch are good guys to have their pulse on the community…and they both say yes.