Most people don't realize it but they just want to run a process. That's where the computation is defined that you care about. And in many cases, you want to run a long running daemon process. So why are we futzing around with hosts and virtual machines? If all you want is to run managed processes in a cloud (which is what you should want), then OpenStack is unnecessary. You could just write automation around Docker, regardless of whether you're using EC2 or physical servers.