The Havana release of OpenStack was launched on October 17, about three weeks prior to the OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong. As always, there are many new features -high availability, load balancing, easier upgrades, plugins for development tools, improved SDN support, fiber channel SAN support, improved bare metal capabilities- and even two new core components, Ceilometer -metering and monitoring- and Heat -orchestration of the creation of entire application environments- to admire. Without any doubt, OpenStack is becoming more enterprise ready with each new release .
While these features new capabilities are important, what really matters are two key facts that are more prevalent than ever.
Every time a new technology is introduced to the data center, there has to be a business case, that answers the seemingly century old question of the CFO: “Why should I care?”. Making the business case for OpenStack is indeed non-trivial, as there are many factors to consider and scenarios to plan for. Simply putting out OpenStack for developers to play with, will not make them abandon Amazon Web Services. To be successful, OpenStack must be part of a comprehensive and application-centric IT strategy and should not even aim at fully replacing AWS. It is important to understand that OpenStack is only one destination for specific enterprise workloads and works best when embedded within the existing enterprise IT context. There are very interesting sessions at OpenStack summit that will demonstrate how early adopters have successfully integrated OpenStack with their DevOps processes that are based on Git, Gerrit, Jenkins and other standard development and test software.
Ultimately, the OpenStack vision comprises of a much more application centric list of tasks, such as configuration management, continuous deployment, auto-healing and scaling of entire application environments. That said, it is essential to note that these capabilities will all remain basic and focused on integration capabilities with a wide range of enterprise IT management tools. At the end of the day, we must not forget that the vendors supporting OpenStack cannot be interested in OpenStack replacing their own IT management tools and hardware platforms. The reason these vendors are supporting OpenStack lies in the common desire to make their software and hardware available to a broader customer base.
Participants in recent EMA research projects have repeatedly noticed that we have classified OpenStack more as a standard than an actual IaaS software platform. This was a deliberate decision by EMA, as we see the key value of OpenStack in creating a common standard that will help customers integrate currently existing siloes in storage, network and compute. To achieve this integration, hardware and software vendors must agree to making their products available to be accessed by the individual OpenStack modules (Nova, Cinder, Swift, Glance, Neutron, etc.). Ultimately, OpenStack delivers the ability to mix and match 3rd party solutions, based on application requirements. Therefore, we regard OpenStack as a standard.
Finally, here are some questions that remain to be answered in the near future: