Gartner has published a report that’s very critical of OpenStack, and there’s been some sharp push-back from the vendors involved. It would be tempting to say that the truth is between the poles of the discussion, but I think the truth may be orthogonal to both positions, somewhere out there in the aether where it’s been consigned by hype. The big problem I have with this whole discussion is that it’s about what the conditions are in Atlanta when the problem is getting from New York to LA.
OpenStack was cynical in its origins. It was founded by Rackspace in an attempt to derail Amazon’s runaway success with its IaaS EC2 service. Wrap yourself in the Righteous Cloak of Open Source, create a consortium, and you make everyone who doesn’t join—including Amazon, who clearly wouldn’t—look bad. It’s fair to say that the early process was all about “Anyone but Amazon”, and I’ve noted that in blogs.
I’ve also noted that OpenStack now appears to have genuine momentum and is in my view the main point of thought leadership in the cloud software stack area. The OpenSource framework is necessarily augmented by technology-specific (and therefore vendor-specific) implementation stubs, but that doesn’t mean that the process is proprietary, only that it accommodates the fragmented nature of the equipment market. The critical positive for OpenStack is that it appears to have the beginnings of a useful and general model of virtualization. Quantum, the network interface, is particularly critical because it’s the only thing in cloud stack software so far that attempts to relate the network explicitly to the cloud (some DevOps tools also try this).
But don’t take this to mean I’m a wide-eyed enthusiast with respect to OpenStack. My view of the cloud is simple; if it’s a true revolution that justifies accommodations like IaaS to “convert” applications to it, then it must have a native architecture that could be supported by applications directly. Such an architecture would look like a hybrid of SOA and PaaS, and OpenStack has no specific provisions for either of these things. I like the “container” model that’s offered in some Linux, Solaris, and even BSD derivatives. It doesn’t have the same solid buttressing against interaction that you find in a virtual machine, but it does have an easier evolutionary path toward the unified SOA/PaaS vision that I believe will eventually characterize the cloud, and lead to its success. The challenge is making one of these “container” cloud models into a widely accepted cloud contender. Joyent has done the best job with this so far, but it doesn’t yet articulate the unified model even though it has probably the most tools to support it of any of the current cloud software crop.
The most basic test of any concept in technology is where it takes the market, not how it takes the market to a destination it doesn’t define or justify. The responsible surveys on the cloud have shown that the big issue inhibiting adoption isn’t security or compliance or technology, it’s that the buyer can’t make a business case. Virtualization is server consolidation. IaaS is hosted virtualization, a way to run applications that expect bare-iron execution in a cloud framework. So to consume the cloud, we continue to write non-cloud apps and then run hosted virtualization to get them on the cloud. Color me naïve, perhaps, but that seems to lack elegance at the least and sanity at the worst.
The cloud is a virtual-resource model. The best cloud strategy is the one that virtualizes the resources the best, and then matches the model of virtualization with the application in a similarly optimal way. No waste from production to consumption. We can get there from any model, including OpenStack, but we’ll get there fastest if we stop carping about non-issues and face the reality that a cloud application isn’t one that just runs on the cloud, it’s one that’s written for the cloud.
A decent gain in stocks may have been throttled by HP’s announcement that it was hoping, by 2016, to be able to match revenue growth to GDP growth. Hey, wasn’t tech supposed to be a growth industry? Actually, the forecast isn’t terribly out of line with the longer-term trendline, which is that technology spending has been growing at less than the typical premium over GDP growth for a decade now. What tech needs is a new benefit case, a paradigm that would improve productivity more and thus accelerate tech spending by raising the “R” in ROI. Is the cloud that something? We think it could be, but we’ll have to see if the cloud’s execution can rise above the hype.