Perhaps OpenStack’s biggest flaw lies within the fact there is no ownership for long term product vision. This lack of product leadership hinders its success, said Randy Bias, Founder, CTO, and CEO of Cloudscaling Group, Inc., in a live interview with theCUBE co-hosts Jeff Frick and John Furrier at the 2014 OpenStack Silicon Valley conference.

Bias’ talk at the event focused on the overall direction of OpenStack, and ways to make it more successful. He also attempted to draw out a big problem: while OpenStack has a clear mission and there exists a vision for the community, “there isn’t product leadership. There’s no ownership for what is the long term product vision” on a program-by-program case, Bias explained.

When OpenStack was first launched, it only included two programs. There are now nine programs integrated into OpenStack, and that number is expected to grow to twenty. As it grows, so do the challenges to make each program successful, yet there are integration issues and bugs that arise. While the conversations on whether the heart of OpenStack is the code or the API, there is “no one who owns creating alignment,” said Bias.

Bias agrees that APIs are important, “but not the only important thing,” he said. “Code is also important. Having some kind of understanding of what all of this is.”

How can leadership take hold in the OpenStack community?

Asked how someone would take or be given a leadership role, Bias said there was no single model, yet people had solved this problem in the past. “The thing it never is, is grassroots.” Right now there are “too many people who have widely different opinions. We need smaller groups of people who focus on tighter, smaller missions,” he purported.

“Great product leadership comes from a combination of two things,” stated Bias, “ruthless prioritization and saying no.” He added that one of the best things Linus Torvalds, the principle force behind the open source Linux operating system, was saying no when people wanted to put things in. Bias finds it important to have a separate product leadership group that is not owned by any one entity. ”We need that inside OpenStack to be more successful,” he said, noting things “will get more difficult as we get to maybe 20 integrated projects.”
See Bias’ entire segment below.