According to me the future would be Mobile technologies, Big data and Cloud. OpenStack is the biggest open source project after Linux. It's been funded and contributed by IT gaints like Google, Dell, Ericsson, IBM, Huawei, HP, Rackspace, Cisco, Redhat, VMware, Oracle, Mirantis, Citrix, SUSE and many more( 559 supporting companies ).Google has its own Cloud, but still it's contributing to OpenStack.

There is strong potential for Enterprise-class capabilities with OpenStack. There is rapid growth in developing New Components ( new features ) in OpenStack. The flexibility and Versatility is one of the biggest assets for companies using OpenStack. No lock-in to Service providers. Its Opensource, which makes companies with budgets issues tend to switch to OpenStack. Finally if cloud is the future, OpenStack will play major role.

It might seem like there is no hype around OpenStack anymore(you don’t see it everywhere around you as you previously did). This is good news. Traditionally, deployments have been to a single cloud (even if they were multi-region deployments). OpenStack wanted to disrupt this in that:

1. It offers a convenient way to deploy to Multi-cloud environment.
2. It offers to help you automate your deployment to your own on-premise / private-cloud environment (and this can be one of the multi-cloud environment I have mentioned).

Fortunately / Unfortunately, people largely use it for case #2. It is in this use-case OpenStack is widely used and therefore still relevant. However, as one might guess, the number of people deploying on-prem is not very high and the number is reducing by the day.

Ideally, businesses can also use this to deploy to Multi-Cloud environment, but they don’t (at least for the large part) .

Businesses typically try to go for multi-cloud deployments for two reasons.

1. Scaling or Availability issues (Where one cloud performs better in a region than the other). This is the reason for the majority of multi-cloud deployments from what I have seen.
2. They want to cut costs and use whatever is cheaper (whenever) in each cloud.

(Note: Avoiding vendor lock-in is very important but isn’t prioritized over these two issues at least for most small-medium businesses).

In both cases, Businesses typically go through a third-party service to achieve this. For example → Scalr - The Hybrid Cloud Management Platform | Scalr or Multiplay (for scaling needs of your gaming platform) (On a tangent here, but this is a great read → Mastering the Apex of Scaling Game Servers - GDC 2019).

Multi-cloud deployments are a problem that many tools are trying to solve (Google Anthos does all of this but is a managed service, therefore, one level of abstraction above OpenStack [It also deploys managed OpenStack IIRC].). OpenStack has done this quite well but nobody has really taken advantage of this as far as I can tell. This is the bad news.

So is OpenStack dead? Not really. But it is now or never for OpenStack IMHO. (Having said all of this, I have not discussed the state of OpenStack itself but only its usage in the industry. To know more about how OpenStack is as a tool - read further here: r/linuxadmin - What's the deal with OpenStack?).

So, I was on the Nebula Project at NASA from 2010 to 2012.

1. OpenStack is still in use at NASA.

2. Nebula was defunded in 2012. Reasons were many, one was successful execution of project. The plan had always been to engage commercial parties to solve problems for NASA in an ongoing productive manner. And that was EXACTLY what was achieved.

3. Nova was never based off of Eucalyptus code, architecture, or related in any way beyond developers and operators seeing Eucalyptus as so poorly designed as to require us to write something radically different ourselves. The core architectures of OpenStack have shifted since 2012. However, much of the original NASA architecture remains intact. You don't see many commits in github due more to emerging CI workflow than anything else. If OpenStack shares any architectural similarity to anything else in the world, it's Opsware ( HPSA ). And that's due entirely to both being service oriented architectures and written in python.

4. AWS offers no benefits over OpenStack. I helped perform the SMD testing of the OpenStack cloud environments. And there's probably a thousand pages of information I could dump down on this, but what it comes down to is simply this. AWS is no better than OpenStack. A private infrastructure is better than a public one in this environment due to policy and procedural requirements. And that's the end of it. Anyone who says otherwise is either wrong, or has a very specific agenda they are pushing. FTR Eucalyptus was a nightmare to support. And is still fairly terrible.

Example: What happens when you use the same generic Volume Group names in host devices and in instances.

5. No one posting in this thread has any clue what they are talking about. Seriously, there is not one iota of truth or valuable thought in this entire commentary feed. And the only reason I am responding is because the responses here are so egregiously false as to demand some sort of response. I will not respond beyond the above. Please do not believe everything you read on the internet.

1. DigitalOcean: Perfect for smaller workloads, it offers simple pricing and developer-friendly tools for cloud hosting and app building.
2. Linode (now Akamai Cloud): Known for affordable VPS hosting, straightforward plans, and strong performance.
3. Vultr: Provides a wide range of server locations, flexible pricing, and easy scalability for growing startups.
4. Google Cloud Platform (GCP): Their startup credits and free tier can be a huge help for early-stage businesses, with powerful tools like Firebase for app development.
5. Microsoft Azure: Offers robust support for startups, including free credits and access to its vast ecosystem of services.

Tools like Binadox can help you monitor and optimize your cloud spending across these platforms, so you get the best value while scaling effectively.

Sure!

1. Your workload is such that FPGAs or ASICs are sufficiently more cost effective than stock CPUs and GPUs.
2. Your workload is sufficiently data intensive that the cost of moving your multiple petabytes to Amazon’s cloud dominates your cost.
3. Your data is sufficiently sensitive that the cost to secure your data in order to move it offsite to Amazon becomes prohibitive.
4. Your calculations are latency-bound and your data source is local and immovable.
5. Due to accounting choices your cost to use your local cloud is effectively free.
6. You work for a three-letter agency and, frankly, your local cloud is much, much bigger than Amazon’s. Even if you could clear all of the other hurdles, AWS simply doesn’t have the capacity you need.
7. What you need to do violates the AWS TOS, and working around that becomes cost-prohibitive.

You’ll notice that these are all corner cases. There’s a reason for that. Clouds scale well, and Amazon’s cost-per-whatever is going to be drastically lower than yours until your cloud gets to be as big as theirs.

The situation just changed, which makes me a little sad because I’m a big fan of OpenStack and work with multiple OpenStack providers.

Microsoft released Azure Stack as a direct competitor to OpenStack. It’s on-prem, available as software only or as turnkey appliances from the Big 5, offered as a managed service, and priced either on number or cores or pay-as-you-go. It enables seamless private/hybrid for orgs who are using or are interested in Azure.

I think on-prem Azure is a threat to OpenStack. Microsoft has gargantuan resources and you can be sure they will try to use Azure Stack to drive share and reach. Sure, many orgs prefer open source solutions, but honestly, many don’t care. Most enterprises would value a turnkey solution, public/private/hybrid, with one support number to call, over a cobbled together multi-cloud strategy with two skills sets, two toolkits, and two sources of support.

Putting that into perspective, MS revenue from public Azure cloud was likely around $3B last year, for one company, with close to triple digit growth. Total OpenStack revenue is forecast by 451 Research to hit $3.4B by 2018, scattered across 100+ companies, with about a 25% CAGR — and that was BEFORE Azure Stack hit the ground.

Basic question: which solution is going to have the highest growth — the one that really only does private, or the one that does private/hybrid/public?

The next 18 months will let us see just how well Azure Stack does in the market, to be sure, but MS is not messing around. Now, I don’t think that OpenStack adopters are going away — there’s a rich ecosystem around OpenStack, plenty of big orgs use it, and they’re not going to rush over to Azure anytime soon. But I do think orgs moving away from virtualization platforms, orgs that are mainly Microsoft shops, orgs that need new on-prem IaaS/PaaS for various use cases or compliance issues, and orgs who are afraid of OpenStack complexity will gravitate to Microsoft.

My answer of course completely overlooks the chances of Google or AWS doing something on-prem. If they do, then the situation will change AGAIN.

I do love competition.

It absolutely could, but the barriers are cultural, not technical.

Most companies with legacy in-house IT services are fully entrenched in their siloes. The virtualization team won’t talk to the network team, who wont talk to the backup team, who wont talk to the storage team, who won’t talk to the development team, ad nauseaum. In order to work in a project together, they require a full management-initiated project team and the management willpower to force them to play nice with each other. An even then, they’ll each do their individual best to sabotage the project, so they can go back to their daily routine.

OpenStack requires a far more collaborative environment, and the companies that have the resources to implement it simply don’t have the culture to make it happen.

Some years ago, I was slinging SwiftStack object storage to on-prem datacenter environments. SwiftStack was built on OpenStack Swift, the object storage service in Openstack. I was working with a backup team to build out replicated storage across three data centers and put together this Rube Goldberg-esque round-robin DNS system to shoehorn this into their backup software just so they didn’t have to request an IP address on the global load-balancer. Another time, I was working on a PoC with a storage engineer and trying to configure it for authentication through their Active Directory. He didn’t know all the details to configure it, but refused…REFUSED to call his colleagues on the AD team for the details (that’s their effing job!). I offered to reach out and do all the work for him, but he refused to do that, too, insisting he’ll just figure it out on his own.

And that’s just the storage component. Imagine adding in self-service networks, compute services, secrets management, and all the other things you need for a true developer experience. There’s a reason why developers said “fuck this” and went around IT directly to AWS.

No, OpenStack won’t replace VMware. Not because it can’t, but because people won’t.

One might think that OpenStack has the potential to do with the cloud market the same thing that Linux did to commercial Unix market, effectively eliminating players such as Sun, HP-UX, AIX.

Unfortunately [for OpenStack] this analogy is only partially true. Yes, it provides a free and open source software alternative for the commercial cloud. “Software only” is the key here. Yes, it runs on commodity hardware, but that’s not what makes cloud attractive. Getting rid of all the datacentre-management burden, pay for only what you use, the economy of scale… all these businesses drivers are way bigger than extra cost you pay for cloud-management software alone.

And now, with AWS Outpost, Azure Stack and GKE On-Prem all the major cloud vendors are moving into the enterprise private datacentres, pushing OpenStack out of there too.

OpenStack is a very cool idea, but unfortunately, very little chances of getting into the leading position any time soon.

At this moment, OpenStack has a lot of high hand cards, so it is highly likely it will win the stack war at this end.

My biggest concern to OpenStack is that its release pace is too fast, and without a lot of in-house engineering investment, enterprise won't be able to confidently use it.

As an OpenSource community, it needs to get an out-of-box usable product first before aggressive adding too many features. And OpenStack community seems to pursue the opposite at this moment. Yeah, without an out-of-box readiness, a lot of consulting opportunities come out, but it probably won't help the open source project itself (without several 500-company serious successful stories, competitors still have huge opportunities)
Vendors continue to pick sides between CloudStack, OpenStack
OpenStack vs. CloudStack: The beginning of the open-source cloud wars | ZDNet

I am not selling the CloudStack here (actually, I built an OpenStack solution from bottom up and love it), but because I have the first hand experience, I point out something that OpenStack community may pay serious attention to: focusing on quality, stability and maintainability more than functionality and feature richness.

In regard to Azure’s popularity with startups (or lack thereof) compared to AWS, the real driver of AWS success is Amazon’s cultural focus on delightful customer experiences. Microsoft, in contrast, is much better identified for focus on technical solutions. My proposition is that delighting customers (developers) with a competent, performant and reliable solution has been far important than delivering “superior” technology.

When it comes to creating massively successful, innovative products, there’s a fine line between acceptance and rejection from your customers. Change too little, you’re not innovating. Change too much, and your customers resist adoption. There’s a crutch I like to call “1-3 hooks rule” that explains this pretty well. The basic premise is that with any consumer product, there are three key “hooks” that define it.

To illustrate this, let’s set the stage for this analogy with an example that will help us compare AWS to Windows Azure in consumable terms
Recall the movie Star Wars. Back in the 1970s and prior, Science Fiction was still a bit of a niche segment with a passionate subculture, but with limited mainstream exposure. When Star Wars was released in 1977, it certainly wasn’t the first Science Fiction movie to hit the silver screen. Yet it was the first massive Sci Fi blockbuster, grossing $200M that year. It is still the #3 all-time Sci Fi movie, based on box office revenues. But why this movie and not another?

Psychology dictates that humans accept change up until change becomes uncomfortable – this is when people hit a resistance point and start to reject what is being offered. In the 1970s, hyper-realistic space battles and convincing alien creatures were a pretty radical departure from conventional movie going fare. But unlike preceding movies, the radical change stopped there. The score was classical music. The theme was classic “Good versus Evil”. All very comfortable and consumable stuff.

Take Stanley Kubrick’s preceding (1968) science fiction masterpiece “2001” as a counterpoint. It isn’t a stretch to say that this movie was just as successful at visually portraying science fiction. The score was also classical. But where this movie pushed into the discomfort zone was in the fact that it leaned on abstract, academic themes to drive the story (creation, humanity in a world of intelligent machines, the nature of the divine, etc.). One step too many.
Back to the “1-3 hooks”. For Star Wars, the three hooks were:

Movie Type: Science Fiction
Theme: Good vs. Evil
Score: Classical

3 hooks, but only one was radically different from established norms. Enough change to support successful uptake innovation, but not so much as to lead to rejection. For 2001, 2 hooks were radical departures (movie type and theme). Both great movies in hindsight, but film critics today are generally more favorable to 2001 as the superior movie. But what might have been radical then, is not today.
So let’s look at AWS and Windows Azure using this contextual frame. I’m sure you can guess which is which in the analogy, but to be completely clear, consider AWS first:

- AWS asked developers to make one radical departure in how they develop software: take the server and software off-premise, thus relinquishing control of the metal. Given this, AWS didn’t ask developers to change two critical hooks:
- AWS didn’t limit developers to building software on a specific framework or against a limited/managed API set.
- AWS didn’t ask developers to change how they deploy software. Virtual Machines were already a very comfortable concept when AWS went online and IaaS played to this perfectly.

Now let’s look at Azure:

- The first radical change of taking software off-prem was still there, but Azure also demanded developers change how they develop software, from top to bottom:
- Azure (initially) required developers to build on a specific stack, against specific APIs and SDKs
- Azure introduced Platform-as-a-Service, which abstracted away the notion of Virtual Machines and OS management

That’s 3/3 hooks seeing massive change. Is there any surprise that developer resistance was massive?

I won’t go down the slippery slope of comparing/contrasting the virtues of Paas vs. IaaS, as there are hundreds of posts on Quora that tackle this. What I will say is that Amazon focused on delighting customers, while Microsoft sought to execute a generational leap in cloud technology. Results to this point, speak for themselves. Of note, Amazon continues to creep up the value stack toward PaaS, while Microsoft continues its trek down the stack in pursuit of a broader audience with IaaS support.

As we move forward and the “radical of the past” becomes “the norm of today”, I’ll be watching to see how kind the market (and history) will be to Windows Azure. My gut tells me that just like the movie 2001, the best is yet to come for Azure.

P.S. Regarding other posts in this thread - mostly good points, although please ignore the conjecture. I have seen multiple instances where the cost effectiveness of using all of these platforms is use case specific.

Openstack can be more cost effective than AWS when you have very specific requirements, or your computing requirements reach a sufficiently large scale.

Here’s my take: AWS is IDEAL for prototyping - of almost anything of almost any size. You’ve got everything at your fingertips. You just need to know what to build and how to build it via a web interface or the CLI.

When you start prototyping with AWS, you’re not paying for things like datacenter space, power, cooling, network engineers, operations engineers, IT staff, and their office space, and computers and software that they run…

Now, start with prototyping with openstack… you need IT staff, servers, network gear, datacenter space, etc. There is a lot of fixed, upfront cost before the first VM is launched. It’s not reasonable to compare an AWS monthly bill with how many servers that could buy…

When your application or service grows to a certain scale, it will be natural to look for ways to optimize for cost. Whether that is autoscaling on rented hardware, rewriting your application to be more efficient using cloud services, or bringing it into a datacenter, it only makes sense to consider all options.

The question everyone should be asking is not “Should we use AWS or OpenStack”, but “What is right for my business?”

OpenStack can be installed in nested hypervisor environment because we only need the QEMU emulator for launching virtual machines inside the virtual machine. However, installing OpenStack on AWS EC2 instances is unlike usual nested hypervisor setup, we will have to bypass a few restrictions for the OpenStack setup to work properly. For instance, AWS only allows the packets to flow in their network when the MAC address is known/registered in the AWS network environment. Also, the MAC address and the IP address are tightly mapped, as the AWS environment will not allow the packet to flow if the MAC address registered for the given IP address is different.

For the purpose of “learning”, I suggest you to install it on bare-metal. Even if you only use one machine to install OpenStack, you are already able to learn a lot on how to configure and setup services on the machines. Just install one service, and then one another on the same node until you have whole system works, you will be able to understand a lot about OpenStack. If you spend too much time to overcome the limitations of AWS, I think it’s not a good idea.

Sincerely,

What do you mean for what? If you have a bunch of physical servers lying around in your big-big company, you want to go with virtual machines to save money on physical servers right?

To create virtual machine is a big pain, and to create a whole infrastructure for virtual machine is even more difficult.. That's where cloud engines comes in. You can scale it pretty simply just by adding nodes to cluster. You can launch to spawn thousands of instances (virtual machines) with few clicks from nice web UI, under some project name, or can have some orchestration tools which does this via API when needed automatically, when your monitoring tools detects that you running out of resources, in your web service for example.

In OpenStack Havana (Beta Version), you can even have multiple hypervizors. That means you can have fully virtualized instance, or partly virtualized under linux with LXC (linux containers) which will save your resources.

Cloud engines like OpenStack is a framework for your virtual machine farm, as for example hadoop framework for distributed systems.

Basically +1 to everything Chuck said.

As the token Swift Ops guy I'll also add that Swift is one of the most stable systems I've run in production. A lot of work has gone into making Swift highly resilient (pulling power on 4 or 5 cabs worth of servers and watching the system chug along without flinching is awesome).

Theres also actually a pretty robust toolset to help you keep things running once you wrap your head around how things work (everything from command line utilities to a full Zenoss monitoring ZenPack). All those things make ops task's like new version releases (online/live upgrades) or cluster expansions easy.

tl;dr Swift makes it easy to run a stable production environment.

I think the install base is larger than is publicized. In fact if you start looking at the talent that is coming into the OpenStack world they are fringe players from places that aren't even relevant. You have people coming from academia, government contracting, and other markets that are not commercial in nature.

If we want a better visualization about what is going on we can probably look to the skill sets of individuals in organizations. If you start seeing more skill sets aligned with OpenStack or "Cloud computing with KVM" then you might jump to the conclusion that they are working on OpenStack or have some type of install base.

Certain professional communities will be a wealth of information if you can access their API and make queries for individuals listed as OpenStack *, then cross reference those with the listed skill sets and see if they have what it takes to really install OpenStack. I'd expect to see someone with at least knowledge in Networking, to the level that they can configure an L3 switch. I'd also expect to see at least an intermediate knowledge in Linux.

Anyways, maybe that is a different way to think about it. I hope that is helpful.

OpenStack is a open source cloud computing platform much like AWS, only it is free!

Basically when you get OpenStack, you get a software suite that enables you to set up your own Cloud environment.

There are a few ways to deploy your cloud infrastructure using OpenStack. Let me put it down for you:

1. OpenStack-based Public Cloud: A vendor provides a public cloud computing system based on the OpenStack project
2. On-Premises Distribution: In this model, a customer downloads and installs an OpenStack distribution within their internal network.
3. Hosted OpenStack Private Cloud: A vendor hosts a OpenStack based private cloud including the underlying hardware and the OpenStack software.
4. OpenStack-as-a-service: A vendor hosts OpenStack Management software as a service and customers use it.

Now comes the services that you will be able to enable. The services can be broadly divided into 3 categories:

• Compute
• Storage
• Networking

Now, these services also have attractive names and they are broken down according to different functionalities.

Nova

Nova is an OpenStack project designed to provide power massively scalable, on demand, self service access to compute resources. It is fault tolerant, recoverable and provides API-compatibility with systems like Amazon EC2. It is built on a messaging architecture and all of its components can typically be run on several servers.

This is where your instances will be launched on which you will be running your application on.

Swift

Swift is a highly available, distributed and consistent object store. Organizations can use Swift to store lots of data efficiently, safely and cheaply. Swift powers storage clouds at Comcast, Time Warner, Globo and Wikipedia as well as public clouds like Rackspace, NTT, OVH and IBM SoftLayer.

You can think of object storage as the internal storage.

Cinder

Cinder is OpenStack’s Block Storage Service and provides persistent block storage resources that OpenStack Compute instances can consume. This includes secondary attached storage similar to the Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) offering. In addition, you can write images to a Block Storage device to use as a bootable persistent instance.

It is like a pluggable storage. You can plug it in or out from any instance that you have created.

Neutron

Neutron is a networking project focused on delivering Networking-as-a-Service (NaaS) in virtual compute environments. Neutron has replaced the original networking application program interface (API) called Quantum in OpenStack. Neutron is designed to address deficiencies in “baked-in” networking technology found in cloud environments.

All the different services in OpenStack communicate with each other with the help of neutron.

Horizon

Horizon is the OpenStack’s Dashboard which provides a web based user interface to OpenStack services including Nova, Swift, Keystone, etc. It allows users and administrators of the environment to interact with and manage the various functional components without having to install any local client tools other than a web browser.

You can access all the services and have a overview of your infrastructure including networking topologies with the help of this dashboard.

Keystone

Keystone is an OpenStack service that provides API client authentication, service discovery and distributed multi-tenant authorization by implementing OpenStack’s Identity API. It currently supports token-based and user-service authorization.

Authentication like “who are you?” & authorization like “what do you wanna do?”.

Glance

The Glance project provides a service where users can upload and discover data assets that are meant to be used with other services. This currently includes images and metadata definitions. Glance image services include discovering, registering and retrieving virtual machine images.

To simplify, it is a repository of images, from which you can launch different instances in nova.

Ceilometer

Ceilometer is a data collection service that provides the ability to normalise and transform data across all current OpenStack core components with work underway to support future OpenStack components. Ceilometer is a component of the Telemetry project. Its data can be used to provide customer billing, resource tracking and alarming capabilities across all OpenStack core components.

Heat

Heat is the main project in the OpenStack Orchestration program. It implements an orchestration engine to launch multiple composite cloud applications based on templates in the form of text files that can be treated like code.

Heat endeavours to provide compatibility with the AWS CloudFormation template format so that many existing CloudFormation templates can be launched on OpenStack.

If you want to learn more about OpenStack, you can take a look at these videos:

Before openstack you should know what is cloud?
When you run out processing power say your working on a project which needs more cpu, ram and memory but only for few days then your experiment will over. Buying an infrastructure doesn't make sense. In nutshell, hiring some processing power for temporary or permanent use form the vendors like Amazon, Rackspace and Google App Engine over internet is called Cloud Computing.

You send your input to amazon server, it'll process the input and give back the output. You pay for only what you use.
Without internet cloud computing is impossible.

Remember you can hire what ever you need. If you dont need cpu, only storage is what you need there are cloud providers who will only provide storage service. Anything can be outsourced :)

There are three types of Cloud
1.Public - Amazon, Rackspace, Google App Engine
2.Private - EUCALYPTUS, Openstack, Open Nebulla
3.Hybrid is combination of both private and public. During peek load time shifing a part of load from private to public make it work together.

OpenStack is an open source cloud computing operating system we can say. It is derived form rackspace project. Whereas the rackspace is for public and preconfigured, ready to run public cloud. Openstack is private cloud implementation platform. You have to do alot of configuration inorder to cater cloud services in your own infrastructure for your personalized use.

Hope this helps!

As Mårten Mickos says, AWS and VMware have power bases. I'll speak to the VMware part because cloud IaaS is my job at VMware :-)

I think about this in terms of power bases because in an established market (>$1Bn in size) these are typically the source of future success if a company can execute solidly and leverage them. Barriers to entry for established markets limit the ability of start-ups to be big winners, though it's not impossible. It is more likely start-ups will be acquired by the major players who can then apply their talents and technologies to their power bases.

AWS is the leader in public cloud today in terms of deployment -- its track record, technology platform and customers are its power base. No-one outside of AWS knows how big AWS' business actually is, but let's assume EC2 runs at least 4 million VMs each day.

The ecosystem of public IaaS providers based on VMware is in second place -- there are over 220 public clouds in 29 countries based on VMware's vCloud technology, and even more based on vSphere. Last year VMware's licensing revenue from service providers grew >80%, despite a significant price cut. 4 of the top 5 IaaS clouds in Gartner's IaaS Magic Quadrant are based on VMware technology (AWS being the exception).

VMware also announced it is building its own hybrid IaaS service that will be launched later this year, also based on the vCloud technology. The same technology is also deployed in private clouds in many enterprises. On prem, there are approx 36 million VMs running on VMware vSphere (per IDC), and customer satisfaction is the highest of any B2B technology vendor. That breadth of customer deployment and satisfaction with the technology is VMware's power base.

OpenStack has no strong power base to build upon, despite the undoubted enthusiasm around the project from vendors and early users. Specifically, interest in OpenStack is not translating into widespread deployment at this stage (April 2013), with fewer than 10 public clouds based on the technology. Rackspace is building its OpenStack IaaS subscriber base one customer at a time from scratch, funded by its much larger non-OpenStack hosting business.

OpenStack is supported by a loose coalition of largely competitive vendors, including VMware. Business success for any one vendor using OpenStack does not necessarily translate into success for everyone, which is part of the challenge with a coalition model.

If I knew who would win I wouldn't be typing this into Quora -- I'd be at the sports book in Vegas translating my amazing predictive ability into cash. It is still early in the IaaS market, but barriers to entry are rapidly rising. AWS must translate its early success into broad market adoption, VMware must translate its success in on-prem infrastructure into public cloud, and OpenStack must rapidly find a foothold and build a customer base.

Very likely it will; and in many respects it already has.

Openstack was released before K8s and was greatly favored for deploying VM based workloads in private clouds. Telco industry specially was a big user of Openstack. However, Openstack was not without with its downsides. For instance, the upgrade process of Openstack isn’t a trivial process & could mean prolonged downtime for the running customer workloads in many situations. AT&T telco cloud project Airship: Automated OpenStack Deployment for Open Source Infrastructure addressed this very limitation by using Kubernetes to host Openstack’s control plane components as containers.

With K8s and the rise of container orchestration, the general inclination is towards containers as they are lightweight, very portable & scalable. They don’t require you to do a lot of LCM as well, which VMs require. If we talk about 5G industry, much of the core network functions are already provided as containerized network functions instead of VMs. That is in part to the service based architecture of 5G as well (which again tend to favor containers over VMs).

K8s is not without its limitations too, but the agility, scalability, community support is just too overwhelming for Openstack to counter. The term ‘cloud native’ has become synonymous to applications deployed as containers - so this should tell you a bit about future of Openstack & K8s in cloud.

Several companies compete with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the cloud services market, each offering unique features to differentiate themselves:

1. Microsoft Azure:
   Integration with Microsoft Products: Azure provides seamless integration with Microsoft's software ecosystem, including Windows Server, Active Directory, and Office 365, appealing to enterprises already using Microsoft technologies.
   Hybrid Cloud Solutions: Azure emphasizes hybrid cloud capabilities, allowing businesses to manage and deploy applications across on-premises and cloud environments effectively.
2. Google Cloud Platform (GCP):
   Data Analytics and Machine Learning: GCP offers robust tools for data analytics and machine learning, such as BigQuery and TensorFlow, catering to organizations focused on data-driven applications.
   Open-Source Commitment: Google's leadership in open-source projects, including Kubernetes, provides flexibility and innovation for developers.
3. IBM Cloud:
   Enterprise Solutions and AI Integration: IBM Cloud focuses on enterprise-grade solutions with strong AI and machine learning capabilities, leveraging IBM's Watson platform for advanced analytics.
   Mainframe and Legacy System Support: IBM offers specialized services for integrating legacy systems into the cloud, benefiting organizations with existing mainframe infrastructures.
4. Oracle Cloud:
   Database Expertise: Oracle leverages its strength in database management, offering optimized cloud services for Oracle databases and applications.
   Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Solutions: Oracle provides comprehensive ERP solutions, integrating various business processes into a unified cloud platform.
5. Alibaba Cloud:
   Strong Presence in Asia: As a leading cloud provider in Asia, Alibaba Cloud offers extensive services tailored to the region's market needs.
   E-commerce Integration: Leveraging Alibaba's e-commerce background, it provides specialized solutions for online retail businesses.
6. DigitalOcean:
   Developer-Friendly Services: DigitalOcean focuses on simplicity and cost-effectiveness, offering straightforward cloud services ideal for startups and small to medium-sized enterprises.
   Transparent Pricing: It provides predictable and transparent pricing models, making it easier for businesses to manage costs.

Each of these competitors differentiates itself by focusing on specific strengths, such as integration capabilities, specialized services, regional focus, or pricing strategies, to cater to diverse business needs in the cloud services market.

The short answer to this is no as this is an apples and oranges question. OpenStack and Kubernetes address very different problems. OpenStack is an infrastructure-as-a-service solution. Kubernetes is a container orchestration solution. It is entirely possible to build a cloud that uses OpenStack to manage the infrastructure (VMs or bare metal servers, storage and (maybe) networking) and Kubernetes running on top of that to manage the container-based applications.
With that said, OpenStack has certainly fallen out of the spotlight since the advent of Kubernetes. This is less about Kubernetes being better than OpenStack than OpenStack having been a VM-centric solution to cloud systems and Kubernetes doing containers better than the half-baked solutions that OpenStack initially tried to provide (anyone still talking Mangnum or Kata Containers???).
OpenStack has faded for a number of reasons, but its less about Kubernetes is better than OpenStack than when (Docker) containers became the way to run apps, Kubernetes solved the container orchestration problems better than OpenStack and even Docker’s own solution did.

Jeff Bezos famously said "your margin is my opportunity."

The current margins on cloud computing will continue to erode every year and it isn't crazy to believe margins in cloud computing will eventually look more like the grocery store margins.

This is because it is becoming easier and easier for companies to move their cloud infrastructure on a dime (and in the future, most companies using cloud infrastructure will likely use multiple vendors at once ... if to not be 100% reliant on just one).

The widespread use of containers (like Docker (software) ) will accelerate the ability for companies to move their entire system to a new cloud compute vendor for a small discount. That means that a cloud compute company with spare capacity can entice companies for extremely low prices (it just needs to cover operating costs).

Companies like Amazon know this and they are using their power to move up-market and provide additional services that are potentially higher margin. But even if Amazon can't end up pulling that off, it will likely remain the dominant cloud computing platform for a long time because it is the only large technology company that is used to competing in very low margin space. Companies like Google will have a tough time redesigning their culture to compete with the ultra cost-conscious Amazon.

Two parts to the answer:

OpenStack and Cloud Foundry are different
OpenStack and Pivotal are very different projects that solve different problems and play in two different ecosystems - even if they are sometimes used together. Looking at the success (or lack thereof) of one to project to predict the success of the other's is not going to work.

Pretty much the only thing they have in common is that they are 'open source'. I use it in quotes because open source is misunderstood, there are multiple licenses to publish software as open source and a few very different structures and business models behind an open source project. OpenStack has a foundation with voting rights, etc.

It's like predicting the success of OpenOffice based on the success of MySQL.

Cloud Foundry is a PaaS

OpenStack is the foundation shared by many cloud service providers as the foundation for their clouds. It has been very successful, with Rackspace, HP, IBM and others using in production, powering tens of thousands of production, mission critical systems. It is a mature, fairly complete platform for that purpose.

For private clouds, OpenStack is in an earlier stage of adoption with a couple very interesting success stories. It will be interesting to see if OpenStack starts eating into VMware's share once (if) more mature management tools become available and the ecosystem grows.

Cloud Foundry is a PaaS, which is a platform optimized for developers. It's a good idea, but so far PaaS platforms have had limited success. For large organizations they make sense, but precisely what makes them attractive for developers is what makes most PaaS platforms un-attractive for operations teams.

While analysts have been predicting hockey-stick growth for PaaS platforms for years, my prediction 5 years ago was that they will stall and evolve to find a model that can be successful. So far my prediction has been accurate.

I believe PaaS platforms will evolve to adopt elements of configuration management, will pick up some DevOps principles, and the line between PaaS and IaaS will blur. Then they will start becoming successful over time.

The success of Cloud Foundry depends as much on the evolution of PaaS platforms, their adoption by enterprise organizations, and how Pivotal plays its cards in terms of making the platform truly open or not and how they help develop an ecosystem around it.

Technology platforms are not adopted by their technical merits, which is an assumption many technologies believe in their hearts.

It will be interesting to see how PaaS evolves in the next few years.

OpenStack is a worldwide association of technologists and developers engendering an open source cloud-computing platform for Private and Public clouds. It provides Infrastructure-as-a-Service and is written in Python. OpenStack comprises a series of correlated projects providing different components for cloud infrastructure solutions. OpenStack software provides a massively scalable cloud operating system consisting of Compute, Storage, Network pools.

Using Horizon ( Dashboard - It provides web based GUI) and Command line, we can Launch Instances, Create Networks, Add Storage and many more sub Functionalities. Core OpenStack services are

Nova - Were you Launch Instances.

Neutron - Were you create networks.

Keystone - Were you create users and projects.

Cinder - Were you create volumes for instances .

Swift - Object store for storing files.

Glance - For storing OS Images.

The Mandatory Pic

On Enterprise level you install Openstack on physical Servers. Installing can be done in many ways

• You can install Openstack like other softwares using Devstack. You can do this in your own Laptop using Virtual Box.

DevStack - an OpenStack Community Production

• You Install it manually, which involves changing configuration files. You can do this in your own Laptop using Virtual Box, But it requires more RAM (16 GB) otherwise it may be very slow.

OpenStack Installation Guide for Ubuntu

• Using Fuel.
• Using RDO.
• And few others.

Openstack project was initially started by NASA and Rackspace in 2010. OpenStack Foundation was established in 2012 and now more than 500 companies have joined. It has two release every year. Current release is Liberty.

"In the housing market, who will win between Century 21, Home Depot and a lumber mill?"

They're selling different things to different people. They'll likely all "win", in the sense that cloud adoption is still nascent in many companies.

That said, here are my personal opinions on the prospects of these three particular companies/organizations:

• AWS owns the public cloud market. Just like Google owns search, this is a market where it is extremely difficult to unseat the leader. You not only have to match Amazon's investment is technology, you have to get ahead of them to the point where customers see an advantage to using your service instead of Amazon. AWS will likely remain the market leader for the foreseeable future and reap the benefits of that position.
• VMware sells to premium customers, the enterprise IT shops with more money than brains. EMC had this same strategy for storage, not surprising that they bought VMware. It's likely a comfortable and profitable business, but by limiting themselves to a small subset of the overall market they've limited their options for exponential growth. So continued, steady profitability but nothing exciting.
• OpenStack seems to have the most traction in the private cloud market. But I personally think all of the major private cloud stacks are solving the wrong problem (see my answer to What are the advantages and the disadvantages of OpenStack v. Eucalyptus, and enStratus v. Scalr v. RightScale?) I think this is reflected in the relatively modest adoption rates of these platforms. Every IT shop with more than 2 machines wants a cloud, but relatively few of them have adopted one of these stacks. OpenStack may be the best thing available now, but I imagine it will eventually get left in the dust by someone solving the actual problems faced by IT shops that can't use public clouds for whatever reason.

OpenStack is essentially a cloud operating system. You can think of it as an Operating System for running and managing a huge number of Operating Systems (like windows,linux,etc). And most importantly, it is OpenSource. (unlike the popular Amazon AWS)

It can easily run on commodity hardware and scale horizontally (just add more commodity hardware or PC)

Technically, it's an Infrastructure platform and its main components are Computing (commonly known as Virtual machines or instances), Networking and Storage.

Application-wise, it can help you from server resources (CPU/Memory/Network/Storage) to specific application hosting.

Hope this helps.

AWS like business model:
1. Relies on economics of scale: So whoever has more customers will be able to reduce prices.

2. Is a subscription based model: So whoever can retain customers and increase their "customer lifetime value" will win.

3. Competition is based on high differentiation and pricing: There will be a constant pressure of reducing price and keep on maintaining the technological differentiation.

4. Has high entry and exit barrier: High infrastructure cost, technological innovation along with substantial user base will be required to be successful.

5. Has low threat from substitutes: It's not very easy to change from one provider to another once your application is up and running. This is very favorable to the providers and is worth the effort in acquiring customers.