So take a look at this video for my overall event report (and see my Day #1 blog post here):
No time to watch? Check out the 2 slide summary:
More time - read on:
Tough to pick the Top 3 takeaways - but here you go:
- OpenStack grows up - I spoke to many OpenStack veterans, including 4 'original' attendees of the very first summit in Austin... and they all see more of an enterprise attendance, more 'suits' and interest from enterprises. That's a welcome and good development.
- Great Story for ISVs and Telcos - but the rest? - OpenStack has become the de-facto standard for network and device virtualization - with all the benefits of opensource (one major being... 'it's free') as well as for ISVs sitting on complex architectures and looking for ways to move their data centers to a standard, IT accepted offering (e.g. SAP and Workday were presenting). The question is - what about the rest of the enterprise spectrum. We heard encouraging statements from WalMart and WellsFargo - but they were less flamboyant than the 'all in' messages we hear at the public cloud events. An area to watch.
- Right Themes for Mitaka - but where is the sizzle? - Keeping the focus on manageability and usability makes of course a lo of sense for OpenStack, but the community needs to be careful to not spend too much time looking in the rear view mirror. Key innovative cloud areas like Microservice Management, Serverles Architecture, Machine Learning, Bots, In Memory advances, Big Data securing and even security are not land mark items going forward (for now). This is a very challenge of the nature of OpenSource, enterprises and people need to spend time and money to make things work - and sometimes making things work takes a longer time. In the meantime the next innovation pops up somewhere else. In the meantime all these innovative areas offer a differentiation strategy to all OpenStack players - but that can also lead to more fragmentation, with the risk of loosing interoperability and the vendor diversity advantages of OpenStack (see IBM's attempt to stop that in general here).
MyPOV
Good progress by OpenStack. The community has weathered the significant reduction of commitment of a large member (HP) well, and it looks like the roadmap and projects have not taken (too much) of a hit. Good to see more attendees, over 50% first time attendees show an interest beyond the early adopters. And projects are maturing, which on the one side is good to see - but OpenStack may have a 'pipeline' problem. 2013 efforts were balanced across 'Proof of Concept (POC)' / Test and Production - now Production has doubled (good) but the percenage of members in POC mode has gone down to 50% (see below). Are still enough new members looking at OpenStack?
OpenStack will have to work hard to keep up the value proposition and create growth vis a vis the prominent public cloud vendors. 2016 and the future will be different as many (e.g. IBM, Microsoft and Oracle) now offer the cloud stack on premises, too - which reduces the value of one of the key OpenStack arguments. We will be watching...
Still not enough - check out my Storify collections of Day #1 (here), Day #2 (below) and the Analyst Summit (here).