Thursday, February 06, 2014

Openstack ... this is the year! Again!

Every year, I hear people tell me that this is the year that OpenStack will make it big and challenge Amazon.

Every year, I repeat the same response.

If OpenStack is ever going to be big, it's going to need to create a competitive public market. It needs a player (or players) with a brutal commodity focus and smart gameplay to make a massive investment (today, probably around the order of $5 - $10 billion+) in order to create public clouds that are AWS clones. It's going to need those players to lead the project and go head to head with Amazon.

It doesn't need a company trying to enforce its own API regardless of the market as part of an on-ramp to its own services.

It doesn't need a primary focus on private cloud, a transitional space which will come under increasing pressure over the years. It must look at the public market i.e. AWS and GAE.

It doesn't need endless discussions and a collective prisoner's dilemma differentiating with each other.

It's doesn't need a free for all and a lack of strong leadership.

As more time passes and without that player(s) emerging then despite all the noise about OpenStack, my view remains the same