Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2016. Read them in this 8th Annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by John Meadows, VP of Business Development at Talligent
2016: OpenStack in the Enterprise Realized
2016 is the year that OpenStack officially crosses the chasm and achieves mass production adoption within the enterprise. The “Official Year of Openstack” has been predicted (likely including in this forum) in the past but we can now see clear signs that it is true. The past 12 months has had plenty of announcements about the use of OpenStack for private cloud deployments within large enterprises. Ease of use, available qualified resources, expanded on-demand use cases, and ongoing cost pressures on IT departments are converging in 2016.
Here are the details:
1) Deployment tools from the key distributors have made installation and management of OpenStack much easier, solving key issues that made OpenStack so complicated to deploy and manage in the past. Each installation is still something of a unique snowflake but standardization is happening quickly.
2) Enterprises are making large investments in training staff on the operation of OpenStack and the OTJ training of the ongoing POCs is paying off. Manpower has been a critical limiting factor previously. Recruiting and retaining certified staff was difficult.
3) The use cases are expanding. OpenStack supports IaaS, PaaS, containers, and a wide range of software defined networking. The pets vs cattle descriptions have lost a lot of their meaning as companies are getting comfortable with putting real production workloads on their cloud.
4) Organizations are having to get serious about reclaiming some of the shadow IT that has gone to the big public cloud providers. Those providers are convenient but expensive. The on-demand elastic cloud solutions that customers require can now be provided behind the firewall.
The number of referenceable customers will increase, the naysayers will be (somewhat) silenced, and the growth of OpenStack for enterprise production workloads will accelerate. Make your plans for the OpenStack Summit Austin in April 2016 now!
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About the Author
John Meadows is VP of Business Development at Talligent, the leading provider of cost and capacity management solutions for OpenStack and hybrid clouds. Talligent recently announced the general availability of Openbook v3 which simplifies the tasks of planning, charging, and predicting capacity requirements for cloud services. Contact us at Talligent.com for more information.
