The OpenStack Conference and Design Summit is happening this week. The group assembling represents a community that in less than a year has attracted a worldwide developer group and enough influence to attract organizations such as Canonical, Citrix and Cisco. These are partners which are now contributing to the effort to build an infrastructure that anyone can use to build their own cloud environment.
OpenStack is also a contrast to Amazon Web Services (AWS), which had such an outage last week that people are starting to see what the alternatives are to the service, which is now the dominant leader in the space.
James Staten of Forrester wrote in a blog post today that he has been fielding calls from AWS customers that have lost data, following the AWS outage. These are customers who are now open to new alternatives.
For OpenStack that means it has more of a wedge than it did before. It highlights a few things. Not just that OpenStack is an open infrastructure compared to AWS. It also points to the differences in the ecosystems.
Staten:
Amazon’s massive ecosystem of management software, SaaS, Platform as a Service (PaaS) and independent software vendor (ISV) partners are all just customers of AWS. They aren’t contributors, nor are they I&O peers. OpenStack’s ecosystem includes many of the above but also service providers, government agencies and enterprises who are implementing OpenStack as well. Which means that if you choose to implement OpenStack for your private cloud or you are a hoster implementing it for your IaaS, there is an I&O peer network you can call on in times of crisis who have intimate knowledge of the software and can help you diagnose the problem and even potentially supply a patch to reverse the problem.
OpenStack is still a new entity. But its momentum is unquestioned. And it may have a better chance at succeeding, following the unfortunate series of events that fell upon AWS and its customers last week.
What do you think?
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