We’ve come a long way. July 19th marked the official six year mark from the launch of the open source private cloud ecosystem OpenStack. There were worldwide meet ups to celebrate the event and it is clear that this is part of the continued positive growth for the open cloud platform.

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OpenStack Technical Committee Meeting Highlights

If you want to review the results of the OpenStack Technical Committee meeting that just happened on July 17th, you can find a great read right here.  As the ecosystem keeps growing, so do the challenges with keeping the velocity of innovation, collaborative approach, and also governance and leadership to keep things on track.

The Technical Committee has a difficult role in maintaining the vision, and ensuring the execution of that vision. What we are seeing is that the long-understood link between people, process, and technology has the greatest potential to provide success when fully understood, and the greatest risk of failure if it is not. The problems that OpenStack have faced have been both technical and people/process related. Just like any private cloud deployment, the consumer of the technology has to be fully on board with what’s happening or else the end result is probably not going to be fully adopted.

It’s great to see some of the content that was shared out from the meeting. The vision definition is really helpful for all of us in more ways than just leading an open source project. Here is what was brought out as noted in the blog from the OpenStack team:

In a vision, you describe the future state you want as if it happened. A vision is:

– Inspiring to all that are involved in implementing it.
– Strategically sound, as in, we have a decent shot at making the vision reality.
– Documented. You must write it down to make it real and make it work.
– Communicated. You have to document it but not expect people only to read it, you have to tell your community about your vision.

Those are tips that we can all take to heart for projects of all shapes and sizes, in and out of the office.

OpenStack Newton and the OpenStack Summit in Barcelona

Since October is approaching, we also have two big things happening. The OpenStack Newton release will be out on October 10th, which will mark the 14th release of OpenStack. We can look forward to proposed improvements in the networking stack, more around encryption and security across projects including data-at-rest encryption work for Swift, and much more.

OpenStack Ansible is getting lots of attention as well. RefStack continues to get the notice that it deserves which is helping to drive standardization and help to feed back to the community on how OpenStack is being consumed today out in customer sites. The OpenStack unified client continues to gain stability and traction. Plus, we see lots and lots of the word “stability” sprinkled throughout the project backlog. Micro-versioned API has also been an item that is showing up for the projects to help unify the approach to API versioning across all of the platform.

The focus from the working group meeting at the Newton design summit in Austin put a lot of weight around manageability. While the documentation from that meeting may be from May, we can hope that they have been able to keep the train on the rails and execute on a lot of what the community has been hoping for.

Containers will continue to be the hot topic as the feature list around the Magnum project continues to grow. We will also see a lot more Kubernetes integration heading into the Summit in Barcelona. The top areas of growth from the OpenStack User Survey were in NFV (Network Function Virtualization) and containers. We seem to have moved past the hype cycle and into real-world utilization, which gives us an idea of where the world of IT is beginning to evolve.

Happy Birthday, OpenStack! We look forward to celebrating many more birthdays and Summits together.