8 OpenStack Questions? Answered.
Yesterday GigaOm's Barb Darrow intrigued the cloud community with her 8 questions about OpenStack as the next summit approaches. As always, I have the answers to all of them.
1. What’s IBM’s play?
They are a big company and it takes them a long time to do anything. They haven’t figured out their OpenStack play yet. They only know that OpenStack is big and they have to be there. As history shows, once they do figure it out, they’ll give everyone a run for their money.
2. Who’s on Jonathan Bryce’s dream team?
Lauren Sell and Mark Collier. Yes, Mark Collier will work for the foundation.
Does this mean that OpenStack will be RackSpace dominated? Not really. Jonathan, Mark and Lauren have been squarely focused on the community since inception and have grown to become OpenStack people, not RackSpace people. Even if they were RackSpace people, better them, then community outsiders with no situational context at this fragile time for the newly spun off foundation.
3. What’s Cloudscaling up to?
I actually know that too, but I won’t tell you =). All I can say is that, as most things with Cloudscaling, it’s awesome!
4. Openstack — the Linux or Unix of cloud?
It is the Linux, not the Unix of the cloud. No, it will not fragment. With the amount of marketing and engineering momentum behind the community, the trunk version of OpenStack already today is a vector that nobody in the ecosystem has the resources to fork it into a parallel branch. OpenStack will be the kernel of the cloud.
5. Is VMware a friend, foe or frenemy?
You know my thoughts about that.
6. Will OpenStack prevail against Eucalyptus and CloudStack?
You DEFINITELY know my thoughts about that.
7. Will there be surprise new OpenStack players?
Yes, there will be at least one new, very intriguing contender for OpenStack dominance that will compete with OpenStack distro vendors (and CloudScaling in particular). And, no, it’s not Terremark or Verizon.
8. Where are the users?
Check out the Webex keynote at the summit. Also come to my talk on "How to make money with OpenStack" and I’ll explain why it’s not only RackSpace and HP that use OpenStack in production.
