This blog post is written, partly, in response to a post on techreplublic.com titled “Marketing OpenStack’s Progress: Now ‘It actually works’” by Matt Asay

Admittedly, I wasn’t at the OpenStack Summit in which Randy Bias declared in his State of the Stack talk that “OpenStack is at risk of collapsing under its own weight,” but I’m familiar with the sentiment, as I’m sure a lot of people close to the OpenStack community, and open source in general, are.

At least one other industry pundit has gone on record that the community-powered fast moving development is a double-edged sword for the OpenStack project at large. While propelling projects forward with, at most times, consistent momentum, it has lacked focus on interoperability, which has resulted in a number of conflicts among projects that, while disparate, all carry the OpenStack brand.

The result is the slow adoption of the cloud platform due to complexity and growing preference and focus on streamlined technologies that focus on simplicity. “OpenStack can run a fine private cloud, if you have lots of people to throw at the project and are willing to do lots of coding,” explained Gartner’s Alan Waite, further declaring that adoption will continue to suffer in the face of complexity and lack of compatibility.

But what if you could have the best of both worlds? What if you could have the collective mindshare of the OpenStack community, focused on growing the project in way that addresses real world problems? What if you could depend on a team that aims to move the right needles in terms of business objectives? What if you had a version of OpenStack that was as reliable and simple to use as some of its leaner competitors?

Continue reading “Curation-as-a-Service: OpenStack’s greatest offer is sometimes what it doesn’t offer”