Come to stay: OpenStack

Already in the March issue of this year, Joseph Reger from Fujitsu correctly stated at this point:

"There exists an OpenStack optimism in the market that is well-founded."

I fully agree with this statement and would like to further substantiate and reinforce it below.

Two-thirds of the OpenStack environments surveyed worldwide are now in production operation. This is almost 20 percent more than a year ago and a clear sign of OpenStack's maturity.

These include public cloud offerings of all sizes, such as the Open Telekom Cloud launched by Deutsche Telekom at the last CeBIT, intended as a competitor to the top dog Amazon Web Services.

Larger and larger environments are also being used in production in the private cloud environment. The Hana Cloud Platform, probably more commonly known by its abbreviation HPC, also runs on OpenStack and is just one of many cloud environments at the Walldorf-based company.

SAP, a Gold Sponsor of the OpenStack Foundation, is leveraging HPC for its vision of the Internet of Things with Siemens' "Cloud for Industry" MindSphere, which was featured in one of the keynotes at the recent Summit in Austin.

Docker, Rocket & LXD

Another current topic are container solutions such as Docker, Rocket & LXD, to list just three of the better known names. In OpenStack, the direct integration of Docker and LXD is possible via drivers for the compute service. Another powerful project in this context is Magnum, a container orchestration engine.

With this component, cluster managers such as Kubernetes, Mesos and Docker Swarm can be seamlessly integrated. Thus, OpenStack is well positioned in this area - in contrast to other cloud solutions - with a pure focus on the infrastructure and, above all, future-proof.

To close the circle from virtualization via containers, here is a hypothesis for the next hype: the deployment of bare-metal systems in the cloud. OpenStack is well positioned in this area with the bare metal service "Ironic".

With all the technical issues, one should not lose sight of the all-important point for the success of a cloud, regardless of the type: the necessary paradigm shift in the use of the cloud. Unfortunately, very little time is often invested in this. The community and the ecosystem around OpenStack are developing excellently.

More than 2300 developers from almost 350 different companies worked on the most recently published release Mitaka. A few weeks ago, the call for papers for the OpenStack Summit taking place from October 25 to 28 in Barcelona was closed.

The more than 1500 submissions impressively demonstrate the strong interest in knowledge exchange. The German OpenStack Days (DOST) organized by B1 Systems in Cologne in July were sold out and well attended with around 300 participants.

All the previously mentioned points clearly prove to me the enthusiasm and optimism for OpenStack in the market.

As B1 Systems, we have been contributing to OpenStack for more than five years now and are proud to be an active part of this great open source project.

We are gaining positive experience with the introduction of OpenStack at our customers. The high degree of modularization and standardization of the individual projects and the resulting possibilities mean that the requirements of a wide range of customers can be mapped effectively.