The intent behind Rackspace Inc. and NASA’s OpenStack project was to build a community around the first fully open-source cloud platform towards the creation of cloud infrastructure. At the time in 2010, development resources were split between both public and private cloud solutions, pitting OpenStack against market giants like Amazon Web Services with their own proprietary solutions.

But today, while Rackspace still supports the OpenStack public cloud with innovations and seemingly endless scalability, the focus for the company has shifted to primarily work with private cloud solutions because that’s where they have seen the most growth, according to Bryan Thompson, general manager, OpenStack Private Cloud, at Rackspace.

As the market’s only open source infrastructure as a service provider for private clouds, OpenStack has matured its seven year-old portfolio for a specialized market. “We have built a practice over the last several years building, deploying and operating private clouds for customers in our data centers, in their data centers [and] in third-party data centers,” Thompson said. “That’s what we’ve seen a lot of growth in.”

Thompson sat down with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile live-streaming studio, during the Red Hat Summit in Boston, Massachusetts, to discuss where OpenStack is now, who is using it, and what the future looks like versus container-based technology. (Disclosure below.)

Can OpenStack still innovate?

As public and hybrid cloud solutions gain market share, OpenStack faces competition from other open-source initiatives, such as container-based technologies, all seeking to modernize on-premises infrastructure. OpenStack is really the only company to emerge that creates private cloud solutions on a truly open-source platform, according to Thompson.

Anyone saying OpenStack is no longer competitive is likely to be a rival looking to create private cloud solutions on their own proprietary platform, Vellante pointed out. In response, Thompson stated that many of the companies creating private hybrid cloud platforms are actually siloed, whereas OpenStack has the open underpinning technology to give it portability to move between different platforms that are based on that open technology.

“Those that are really saying it’s dead and they’re doing their own proprietary cloud, that’s really just virtualization at scale; they’re not really consuming cloud services in the same framework that OpenStack delivers it,” Thompson explained. “So it is still a vibrant and growing platform; we’re seeing it as the platform of choice for not just how do I move virtualized workloads, but even for containers and other orchestrated solutions on top of that as well.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Red Hat Summit 2017. (*Disclosure: Red Hat Inc. sponsors some Red Hat Summit segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

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