Not so long ago, someone said he felt OpenStack had lost its relevance. Although I hear this from time to time, it always takes me by surprise. Because OpenStack is more alive than ever, moving forward with the forthcoming 20th release of OpenStack: Train. But how can you tell OpenStack is more alive than ever?! Let’s have a look at the facts.

First, let’s take a look at the growth of OpenStack over the years. Not only in users, but also by the number of code reviews. Code reviews are an indispensable part of the development process of the Cloud Infrastructure as they prevent bugs and other mistakes get introduced in the software with every new development. The amount of reviews is therefore a good indicator of the rate that new developments are added to the platform and the relevance of the quality of those new developments. A decline in this amount can indicate that development is stagnating or quality is less relevant. Starting with the first releases (1st, 2nd and 3rd) of OpenStack, roughly 400 reviews per version were done. The 18th version ‘Rocky’ alone had around 90.000 reviews, where most recent version 19 had 94.000 reviews. That’s one of the ways I can tell that OpenStack is more alive than ever!

Network virtualization

OpenStack has become the market’s leading choice of cloud infrastructure for containers, VMs and bare metal in private clouds. Most major telecom companies have been using OpenStack because of NFV, network function virtualization. Mainly because of the proven architecture for large clouds on commodity hardware, but also because of the standardization of telecommunication components and the quick paced developments which they need to follow. But NFV is not only extremely relevant for telecom providers, other major enterprises follow these technology giants with these developments.

Back to the private cloud

Another fact is that the adoption of private cloud is growing again. Where there have always been companies who chose to not migrate to a public cloud, but remain because of mostly legal considerations on a private cloud, companies who have been using the major public clouds for the last couple of years, are more and more adopting the private cloud again. They do so in a slightly different way they were used to because they do not want to have all the knowledge in-house anymore, one of the perks of the public cloud. With OpenStack you can easily start yourself, or work with a partner that knows all about it. The reasons for this shift to the private cloud are mostly based on regaining control. For example: potentially increased security- and performance control, better testing environment control and better control of the threshold levels. Also, the availability of cloud migration applications provides an important role here; it becomes more and more easy for companies to migrate applications from public to private cloud infrastructures.

OpenStack and Kubernetes

Furthermore, Kubernetes remains the top framework among container- and PaaS-tools that are used to manage applications on top of an OpenStack cloud. OpenStack and Kubernetes are increasingly deployed as complementary technologies, especially in multi-cloud scenarios. Last year I wrote an article about this, which you can find here.

As you can see above, OpenStack is well alive and fully in motion. So, I genially have to disagree with the notion that it is ‘dead’. If any, I feel we are only at the early stages of the power of OpenStack. That is why I cannot wait to see what the future holds. If you would like to know more about how OpenStack can benefit you, don’t hesitate to contact us.