At the most recent OpenStack SV 2015 event, I was invited to speak and provide a viewpoint on OpenStack’s future. The year before in 2014 I gave a talk entitled “Lie of the Benevolent Dictator” which spawned the Product Working Group for OpenStack. A blog posting entitled The Future of OpenStack is Now, 2015 in January of this year summed that presentation up along with providing some more color. I have spoken at length on the topic of OpenStack’s future and so it can be challenging to take that discussion to the next level. So this year I tried something just a little bit different.
I tried to spend more time riffing and talking from the heart (than normal) and focused on delivering 5 simple slides in 20 minutes. That’s 4-5 minutes per slide instead of my normal 1 minute per slide. In other words, it may be difficult to get all of the value from this deck that you normally would unless you watch the video itself.
In the video presentation, originally entitled “Three Things OpenStack Needs to Do … Now” except that I couldn’t boil it down to three and settled for five, the key slides are:
- Cloud is NOT “easy”
- COTS has significant cost
- OpenStack is NOT a “cheaper” VMware
- Differentiation == silos
- Infrastructure has zero value
Watching the video is the only way to get all of the value and there are some real gems in here if you spend the time. I share some information I haven’t ever shared publicly before about Cloudscaling’s production deployments for example.
However, for those with attention challenges, here’s the synopsis for each slide:
- Marketing teams who try to position “private cloud” or OpenStack as “easy” are hurting everyone
- “Cheaper” hardware (e.g. from ODMs/CMs) and software (e.g. open source) has it’s own hidden costs
- OpenStack is designed for the Third Platform and using it for Second Platform workloads is a fool’s errand
- Adding secret sauce to OpenStack hurts everyone; not having a true base reference architecture for OpenStack hurts everyone
- Like electricity or cellular minutes, the bulk of value isn’t in the commoditized infrastructure layers, but the applications above that consume it
I hope you enjoy this as I enjoyed presenting it and was more on fire than usual.[1]
[1] I am working on eliminating a certain phrase from my repertoire and replacing it with a new phrase: “belly up.” I humbly apologize for its use in the video. No slur is meant, I simply didn’t use care when choosing my words. This will be rectified.
