I am at the OpenStack Summit here in Austin and the announcements and releases keep rolling out, illustrating that the growing OpenStack market has some real teeth, taking a bite out of the market standbys. Even so, there is still a great deal of fear, uncertainty and doubt around the viability of clouds built upon OpenStack. The real question here is if that FUD is unfounded for today’s emerging markets.
That means taking a closer look at OpenStack is a must for businesses delving further into public, private and hybrid clouds.
The OpenStack Project, which is now managed by the OpenStack Foundation, came into being back in 2010 as joint venture between NASA and RackSpace Hosting, with the goal of bringing collaborative, open sourced based software to the then emerging cloud market. Today, the OpenStack Foundation boasts that some 500 companies have joined the project and the community now collaborates around a six-month, time-based release cycle.
Openstack,, which is basically an open-source software platform designed for cloud computing, has become a viable alternative to the likes of Amazon (S3, EC2), Microsoft Azure and Digital Ocean. Recent research by the 451 Group has predicted a 40% CAGR, with the OpenStack Market reaching some $3.5 billion by 2018. Enough of a market share to make all players involved take notice.
However, the big news out of the OpenStack Summit Austin 2016, comes in the form of product announcements, with more and more vendors aligning themselves with the platform.
For example, HPE has announced its HPE Helion OpenStack 3.0 platform release, which is designed to improve efficiency and ease private cloud development, all without vendor lock-in problems.
Cisco is also embracing the OpenStack movement with its Cisco MetaPod, an on-premise, preconfigured solution based on OpenStack.
Another solution out of the summit is the Avi Vantage Platform from AVI Networks, which promises to bring software-defined application services to OpenStack clouds, along with load balancing, analytics, and autoscaling. In other words, Avi is aiming to bring agility to OpenStack clouds.
Perhaps the most impressive news out of the summit comes from Dell and Red Hat, with the Dell Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Solution Version 5.0, which incorporates an integrated, modular, co-engineered, validated core architecture, that leverages optional validated extensions to create a robust OpenStack cloud that integrates with the rest of the OpenStack community offerings.
Other vendors making major announcements at the event include F5 networks, Datera, DreamHost, FalconStor, Mirantis, Nexenta Systems, Midokura, SwiftStack, PureStorage, and many others. All of those announcements have one core element in common, and that is the OpenStack community. In other words, OpenStack is here to stay and competitors must now take the threat of the open-source cloud movement a little more seriously.
