IDG Contributor Network: OpenStack Summit -- checking in after another six months

I've been following OpenStack since its inception half a dozen years ago.

Back then the fledgling open source cloud operating system was a little project created jointly by Rackspace and NASA. A lot of time, massive amounts of funding and a few different value propositions have gone under the bridge and now OpenStack has its own foundation, huge vendor buy-in and a growing number of production deployments at scale.

Perhaps the biggest indicator that OpenStack has come of age was the (admittedly jarring) sight of Gartner analyst Donna Scott standing on stage in the first day's keynote. While Scott's talk missed the mark by a mile (she spoke at length about the Gartner bi-modal model, a hotly contested topic, but her talk was more of a conceptual piece targeted at a CIO audience, completely different to the 7,500 primarily developer-based attendees at the summit), the wiseness or otherwise of having the talk in that setting, and the fact that Gartner was prepared to go on stage and anoint OpenStack as actually a viable product, was a massive achievement for OpenStack Foundation Jonathan Bryce and his team.

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