Why OpenStack is Ready for Success

I'm unbelievably biased working for GitHub, but the layout of Launchpad is abhorrent. It took me almost 10 minutes to even figure out how to view any of the OpenStack code.

I hope Canonical hires someone with some semblance of design and user interaction if they're going to continue running that site.

I appreciate the author acknowledging some of the hurdles and warning signs that could portend against OpenStack's viability. There are currently an impressive array of organizations pledging support, but talk is cheap. (Very cool that patches are flowing in from some of them already.)

I think the most important signal is another serious provider stepping up alongside of Rackspace with a compatible OpenStack offering. Until then, this is just Rackspace's cloud implementation. Albeit a completely open one that you could in theory replicate on your own hardware, but I imagine that option would be small comfort to most people using IaaS clouds.

Still, it's awesome that they're trying to make it happen, and I'll be rooting for them.

I'd agree that OpenStack has the potential of being a Really Big Deal. They've really got a killer contribution incentive: fix a big or write a good feature and you'll get to use it on Rackspace's infrastructure (or anyone else who hosts an OpenStack server cloud).

Right now that's just a theory, but if Rackspace actually gets it together to have a fairly short release cycle for code to go from OpenStack trunk to running on Rackspace they could really give AWS a run for their money. I loves me some AWS, but having to deal with the typical vendor-client bug fix relationship just blows. The carrot of being able to fix my own bugs would likely make me kiss AWS goodbye for good.

Until there is an actual code drop for the OpenStack compute I'll see this all as hype.