There is a lot of talk about the complexity of OpenStack and the difficulty of mastering it for developers. On the one hand, according to Balaji Sivasubramanian, director of product management at Cisco Systems, Inc., “Customers are trying to build custom solutions more and more, and that works, but that’s not sustainable.”

And on the other, according to Vish Jakka, product manager of Cloud solutions at Cisco Systems, Inc., “It’s not one size fits all. That’s not the case with OpenStack.”

The crux of the problem lies in OpenStack’s rapid cycle of updates, which is both great news to developers waiting on a particular addition and bad news to those happy with the way things are. Sivasubramanian and Jakka told Stu Miniman (@stu) and Brian Gracely (@bgracely), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, it’s crucial for users to determine the right balance of customization and updatabilty for their OpenStack operation.

“What we’re trying to do is figure out, obviously, what cadence you want to have in terms of upgrades,” Sivasubramanian said. “Do we go to the next one, or do we go to the following one?”

Containers and OpenStack

Few areas in application development are hotter than containers right now. Sivasubramanian acknowledged that OpenStack is going to have to be container-friendly if it is going to thrive.

“Container technology is fairly immature right now. People are looking at containers, and now they’ve deployed OpenStack or are trying to deploy OpenStack — and how does that work together?” he said, admitting that this is a challenging area for OpenStack developers.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of OpenStack Summit — Austin. And make sure to weigh in during theCUBE’s live coverage at the event by joining in on CrowdChat.

Photo by SiliconANGLE