OpenStack Gets Real
Submitted by Yoram Heller on October 23, 2012
Last week, I had the opportunity to be a part of the Morphlabs posse attending the Fall 2012 OpenStack Design Summit in San Diego. And I wanted to share a few high-level but noteworthy observations from the week:
A. LOT. OF. INTEREST.
The team awoke bright and early Monday morning (4:00am wake up call!) to head down from Manhattan Beach. We arrived at 7:30am to set up our booth only to find an event that was already bustling. The Summit had sold out earlier in the week, but when I surveyed the line (that wrapped around the lobby…twice), one out of every five people just showed up and didn’t bother registering at all. Apparently a lot of people wanted to be a part of the “most awesome community in action in open source today” – Mark Shuttleworth
Real customers – SPs and now enterprises!
The Grizzly Design Summit was characterized most by the emerging customers. Media Temple launched the Helix Private Cloud Service based on our mCloud Helix. Shortly before the show, Wal-Mart announced their OpenStack deployment. And it didn’t stop there. Comcast also announced their OpenStack cloud. There was also a noticeable increase in the number of interested Enterprises who stopped by our booth. Service Providers were the natural earlier adopters of cloud (with pressure to compete in the face of AWS) but now Fortune 100 financial services, healthcare and media companies were among those in attendance.
Distributions – what are those?
Customers demand support from open source. With the launch of the Cisco OpenStack distribution, customers can choose from basic pure play distributions like Ubuntu, Red Hat and Suse or go with more complete solutions like those of Cisco or Morphlabs. Where there is more choice, the customer wins.
All-in-all, it was a banner week and I was proud to be a part of the Morphlabs All-Star Developer team and a founding member of the OpenStack Foundation. We had talks, breakfasts and breakfast for dinner. It was an exhilarating week that left us exhausted, but we couldn’t be more excited for the future. We’d love to hear your take on the Summit, so post a comment or drop us a note.
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