OpenStack-as-a-Service: OpenStack to Gain Ground in 2015

“OpenStack is hot; and interest in containers is emerging [for company IT priorities in 2015],” says Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, Red hat senior vice president.

OpenStack is an open-source Apache-licensed cloud computing software platform.  It is typically used as the basis of an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) solution. Businesses often choose OpenStack as the foundation software when building private and hybrid clouds.  OpenStack competes against other products that include CloudStack and OpenNebula.

Red Hat recently surveyed their existing customers about  their IT plans going into 2015 and found that many customers are already using OpenStack and also plan to invest more in OpenStack during 2015.  The top benefits that those businesses say that they achieve with OpenStack include:

• Greater Automation (18 percent)
• Improved agility to meet customer and business demand (17 percent)
• Lower costs (15 percent)

Udy Gold, Sr. Director of Infrastructure at PubMatic, said that “enterprises that outgrow their initial use of public clouds are looking for a cloud platform to manage their in-house infrastructure.”

But one of the challenges of new technologies like OpenStack is complexity.  While many businesses are interested in setting up private or hybrid cloud infrastructure, they don’t have the skills or resources to first build out cloud infrastructure and then also continue to maintain it. For those organizations, a number of fast-track solutions are now becoming available that can help get them up and running with an OpenStack cloud infrastructure much more quickly.

The company Blue Box, for example, provides a ‘cloud-as-a-service‘ offering built with OpenStack that uses RackSpace hardware.  Unlike public cloud services like Amazon Web Service or Microsoft Azure where you rent IT infrastructure as needed from a pool of shared hardware, with Blue Box each customer uses dedicated infrastructure.  The infrastructure is managed, updated and maintained off premises by Blue Box.

Another example is Platform9. Today they announced the availability of their Platform9 Managed OpenStack solution. Platform9 uses OpenStack to create a private cloud using the servers that a business already owns.  Sirish Raghuram, Co-founder and CEO of Platform9, said that Platform9 reduces”the complexity barrier to private clouds… Its SaaS simplicity, production readiness, and seamless integration with existing environments enable every organization to manage their in-house infrastructure with greater agility and efficiency.”