Last week’s OpenStack Summit showcased a vibrant developer organization and a healthy, growing user community that includes big names like Wal-mart Stores, Inc., Comcast Corp. and eBay, Inc. So despite some press reports that OpenStack is floundering, it actually is striding toward a bright future, writes Wikibon Analyst Stuart Miniman.

The OpenStack Foundation used the OpenStack Summit in Vancouver last week to clarify its vision for the technology, which has been billed variously as an attempt to compete with Amazon Web Services or a way for companies to avoid the VMware “vTax”. The new vision is of OpenStack as an Integration Engine with a Community App Catalog of solutions. The Foundation was restructured in the last year and is focused on ensuring interoperability among the various solutions that are being added to the technology as well as on defining exactly what can be branded as OpenStack. The lack of interoperability has been an issue for early users and a window for proprietary code from the various vendors building clouds on the technology to creep in.

Technologically, its core is not quite baked yet, Miniman writes, which is not unusual for a five-year-old large software initiative. These typically take a decade to fully mature. Nova, the core compute component, and Cinder and Swift, the storage components, are stable, the networking component, is still in development as the community, led by Brocade Communications Systems, Inc., Cisco Systems, Inc. and Red Hat, Inc. complete the integration of the original code, donated by Nicira, Inc. before it was acquired by VMware, Inc. But Miniman, a networking expert, is confident that this is progressing steadily.

The big technical gap that needs to be closed, Miniman writes, is that each release is disruptive. He quotes Hewlett-Packard Co. engineering executive Mark Interrante as saying that a major goal of the next three releases is to reduce operator load by five times and to add support for containers.

This has not stopped a growing group of early adapters from building sometimes very large production systems on the technology. Several interviewees on theCUBE over the three days of coverage commented on the large contingent of users attending what in the past had been mostly a gathering of coders. Miniman said staff from users were over-filling session rooms, sitting on the floor, to learn and participate in the vibrant community. He quoted Tim Yeaton of Red Hat and Mirantis, Inc. co-founder Boris Renski as saying their companies are supporting large numbers of corporate users.

The full Professional Alert, including links to several of the interviews on theCUBE, is published on the Wikibon Premium Web site. The videos of all the interviews from the conference are available here.

Image courtesy OpenStack Foundation