Why is OpenStack Important?

Sometimes pictures really do convey ideas better than words:

Recently a number of folks I speak with struggle to understand what OpenStack and it's true value. I think it’s due in large part to our tendency to want to attempt to translate everything into an immediate benefit.

When I first saw this image I was reminded of the Canadian Heritage commercial about when Joseph-Armand Bombardier bought his first set of tools ( https://www.historicacanada.ca/content/heritage-minutes/joseph-armand-bombardier)

Openstack isn’t a solution to a problem nor a product, it’s a revolutionary new framework (tool set) to build cloud platforms and it’s still just in it’s infancy. In many tech and in some business circles it’s a hot topic because of it’s capacity to be disruptive. The explosive growth in its attention over the past few years has resulted in it becoming the largest and most well funded Open Source project in the world today.

We’ve taken a different approach than most would assume. Although we have a lot of experience and capability in delivering value in the hosted infrastructure business it’s not our core business model. The best way to describe it would be to compare it to the engineering teams working on Formula 1 racing systems. We get to play with the cutting edge technology to figure out how to do things better, things that have never been done before. Having a public cloud offering gives us the ability to gain insight into the business problems that need to be solved and a method to introduce potential solutions and receive immediate and important feedback on them.

OpenStack provides us with an infinite number of options to explore ways to innovate, it’s like when F1 was in it’s infancy and every part of the system was stock, teams had an opportunity to engineer change for competitive advantage.
Today we take for granted all of the features and benefits the modern automobile has. Many of those came as a result of the research that was done around the racetrack that created valuable IP and was often turned into products for the automotive industry and many other industries as well.

Today the IT sector is going through a revolutionary change called “The Cloud” and in my view, OpenStack is like the ultimate toolbox for those who understand what to do with it.

For the more technical folks who are interested, I found the VMware / OpenStack image on Dmitri Zimine’s presentation that I found very interesting here: http://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale12x/presentations/openstack-vs-vmware-systems-administrator-perspective.html