Can OpenStack occupy a niche in the cloud computing market?

In the cloud computing market, there are a number of major suppliers, most of whom agree that Amazon's cloud computing Service (AWS) is the market leader in infrastructure, service (IaaS), but companies such as Microsoft, Google and Joyent are trying to overtake AWS. Then there is the OpenStack, which faces almost everyone's cloud computing.

As the open source cloud management platform for public or private cloud, OpenStack spent nearly 2.5 of his time building vendor supporters, from Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Cisco, IBM, Rackspace and other companies to support OpenStack. The problem in 2013, experts say, is whether the customer's deployment rate will rise to the same level as the supplier embraces the technology.

Suppliers are taking different approaches to support OpenStack. For example, companies such as Rackspace and Hewlett-Packard built their own public cloud computing products based on OpenStack code. Dell is also committed to such a strategy. Companies such as Red Hat, canonical and SuSE are developing their own supported OpenStack code distributions to help end users build private clouds. These actions are expected to expand the initial deployment already seen on the market.

OpenStack's commitment is to provide an Open-source cloud computing platform that end-users and service providers can use to try to catch up with Amazon's cloud computing services. OpenStack advocates say that a public platform like OpenStack, which supports both the internal private cloud of the user and the public cloud of the service provider, will eventually form an ecosystem in which customers are free to move their applications and workloads between their public and private cloud and across multiple vendors. However, the project has not come this far, and Gartner's Lydia Leong warns users not to expect too much, and that the interoperability between the public cloud and the private OpenStack cloud is not "innate".

But the fact is that OpenStack is growing. At the last summit of the project in the fall of 2012, the spokesman said the project had expanded from 30,000 lines of code to more than 600,000 lines of code since its launch. More than 600 developers are working on the project, with more than 400 developers contributing last year.

"2013 will be a very important year for OpenStack," said James Staten, Cloud computing analyst at Forrester. The OpenStack supplier community has been largely formed and everyone knows which vendors support OpenStack and which are not. These vendors will now move from developing their OpenStack policies to implementing these policies specifically to improve user deployments. "A lot of companies are committed to deploying OpenStack, but they haven't made money from OpenStack," says Staten. ”

To make money, these suppliers need to sell their products. Rackspace has the most mature OpenStack cloud, and as one of OpenStack's founding members, the company has been the leader of the project and is now the first company to add new functionality to OpenStack code in its commercial products. HP has started to launch its public cloud, while Red Hat, Dell, IBM and many smaller companies, such as Nimbula, created by OpenStack pioneer Chris Kemp, are expected to launch OpenStack products in 2013.

In addition to this ecosystem of suppliers and users around OpenStack, the code for the project is maturing. OpenStack holds a design summit two times a year, with more than 1000 developers, users, suppliers and cloud watchers gathered to discuss the latest trends in OpenStack and the development plan for the project. The latest Folsom version adds a virtual networking component called Quantum, developed by Software Definition Network company Nicira (now owned by VMware). The grizzly version of the project is expected to be launched in April 2013, the seventh since the 2010 OpenStack and another version to be released by the end of 2013. According to the latest reports, OpenStack manages the identity and access management of the portal, as well as support for multiple cloud platforms, and will appear in the Grizzly version.

There are also concerns about the project. The main concern is that this is just a marketing project for these big-name vendors, and that users will not deploy as quickly as suppliers. Analyst Staten says it is still at an early stage of the project's development and that user deployments remain to be seen.

Another problem may be that there are already quite mature products on the market now. For example, VMware has a very mature and widely used public cloud and private cloud platform in its vsphere and Vcloud director. Microsoft is also combining its Windows Server 2012 and its Azure public cloud computing platform. Then there is Amazon cloud computing services. Can a service provider that supports OpenStack capture Amazon's market share? Will users abandon Amazon's massive scalable cloud and choose Open source projects that are still in development? In 2013, let's wait and see.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)