The OpenStack Summit in May painted the platform as a work in progress with momentum and investment by vendors led by Red Hat, IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Rackspace. “OpenStack is real,” said John Furrier on theCUBE at the end of the Summit, earlier this month (see embedded video below).

A series of developers interviewed in theCUBE discussed holes that need to be filled in OpenStack’s code, in particular the need for a strong user interface. Their message was that companies seeking to use it today will need to invest considerable programming in the project. In the day three wrap up, Stu Miniman said that at least half of the people he had talked to were developers who “had been at [the OpenStack summit six months ago in] Hong Kong and will be at [the Summit six months from now in] Paris,” implying that the Summit is still a developers’ meeting.

He said he did talk to a few users. Brocade CTO and Chief Scientist David Meyer said in theCUBE that Comcast, the largest U.S. TV cable and last-mile home Internet provider, is configuring all its set-top boxes with OpenStack. So early adopters are realizing business benefit from the platform. Miniman and Furrier characterized the conference as “dev/ops” rather than pure development and Furrier said it is an opportunity for early adopters and potential users to discuss their needs with the developers.

One measure of growing market success will be a shift in the attendees of future Summits to include more users, and in the Summit programs to meet user needs.  Red Hat OpenShift Community Manager Diane Mueller discussed the need for user education programs to support OpenStack adoption.

Huge momentum

x

OpenStack clearly has strong momentum, however. HP, IBM, Red Hat and Rackspace each had 300-plus mostly technical employees at the conference. Miniman said both Brocade and Cisco also where committing to OpenStack, and Brocade and Red Hat sponsored theCUBE at the conference.

Miniman talked about the large number of projects being built on and around OpenStack, including NOVA, a cloud computing management fabric; SWIFT, the first storage management solution, and Heat, the first OpenStack orchestration tool. Beyond these established pieces, the conference boiled with excitement over new projects, to the point that Miniman said the question is which of them will prosper long term.

Hints of friction

x

Miniman also expressed surprise at the lack of contention at the conference. On the surface, at least, all the players are working together, in part perhaps because they have a common enemy in Amazon, which is dominating the new-development (as opposed to the colocation) segment of the cloud business market.

However, some hints of possible underlying tensions emerged. The Summit came just after HP announced its Heleon Managed Private Cloud built on OpenStack, and some industry members had tweeted concern that HP might be creating a fork. In his interview on theCUBE, HP Cloud SVP and COO Saar Gillai said HP is “not touching” the core OpenStack code, and no forking is happening. Its development is focused on building tools that run on top of the platform.

Rackspace, which had created the initial core of the platform and donated it to the open source community, also has come in for criticism in the last year for trying to contdrol OpenStack too tightly. Possibly as a result, it has been decreasing its presence in the community in recent months. Rackspace CTO John Engates emphasized in theCUBE that the company was not walking away from OpenStack but added “this wouldn’t be a strong community today if we had tried to smother it and hold it for ourselves.”

The third day of the conference opened with a bang in the form of a Wall Street Journal article under the headline “Red Hat Plays Hardball on Openstack Software”. The article accused Red Hat of refusing to provide support in Linux for an OpenStack version from startup Mirantis Inc. The article describes Mirantis as a competitor to Red Hat and quotes one customer as saying that it dropped consideration of the Mirantis product because of Red Hat’s refusal to guarantee that it would run on top of Red Hat Linux.

Red Hat General Manager for Cloud Management Joe Fitzgerald defended the company’s record in supporting competing platforms on theCUBE, saying that, for instance, Red Hat supports Amazon Web Services (AWS), a much larger competitor than Mirantis. He said the company cannot guarantee compatibility with products it has not had time to certify.

The Red Hat of OpenStack

x

In the third day summary, Furrier said “The Wall Street Journal really tried to drop a bomb on [Red Hat].” Furrier went on to say the article “is an indication that Red Hat is winning when you see negative articles coming out, particularly from the Wall Street Journal, that were weeks under construction, and are off base.”

Red Hat is winning for several reasons. First, it is an established leader in open source, a company the open source community trusts.

Second, it has made a major ongoing commitment to OpenStack. Alessandro Perilli, general manager for Open Hybrid Cloud Platform Office and former Gartner analyst, said in theCUBE that OpenStack is its Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering, which makes it a major part of the company strategy for cloud. It has also contributed more code to OpenStack than any of the other contributors.

Third, as Perilli said, it has tremendous credibility in the marketplace as the leading partner of pure open source technology. Its strategy is that all its products are open source. The only time it has a closed product is when it buys a company, like ManageIQ, and then works to turn those products into open source as quickly as possible.

Red Hat announced the open version of the cloud management technology at the Summit and, Perilli said, is inviting all the vendors in the market to build on it rather than reinventing the wheel in cloud management. So there is no question of Red Hat creating a forking of the technology. The other major vendors such as IBM and HP, both of which are heavily committed to open source platforms including OpenStack, build proprietary solutions on top of the open platforms.

Fourth, Red Hat is a close partner with many of the other OpenStack leaders in the marketplace, including IBM and HP. Thus, while IBM would never really accept HP as the leader in OpenStack or vice versa, they both can be comfortable with Red Hat.

For all these reasons as well as its large presence at the Summit, Red Hat appears to be stepping up to the leadership role that Rackspace is leaving. So the answer to Furrier’s question of who, if anybody, will be the “Red Hat of OpenStack” may well be Red Hat.

Containers on CrowdChat

 .

SiliconANGLE ran a three-day CrowdChat  in parallel with the conference. While much of the discussion focused on interviews in theCUBE, the most active thread was about the need for OpenStack to “make containers first class citizens,” in the words of contributor “Krish”, who initiated the thread.

This mirrored discussions at the conference itself, where containers in general and Docker in particular were trending discussion subjects.

“There is a lot of activity around Docker at Red Hat,” said Diane Mueller, Openshift Community Manager at Red Hat, on theCUBE. “We have engineers embedded in the Docker community, and we are making it a first class member of Redshift.”

Contributors to the CrowdChat thread speculated that IBM may also announce container support soon. Several contributors discussed whether and how HP might support containers in Heleon.

theCUBE’s next stop will be the Hadoop Summit in San Jose, CA, next week. For those not going, watching theCUBE can be a good way of keeping up with what is going on. And whether you are going or not, check in with CrowdChat to participate in the discussion threads.

Graphics courtesy Openstack community