OpenStack is expecting a promising future according to cloud computing trends

Some time ago it seemed that OpenStack, which used to be extensively involved in a variety of scenarios, was gradually losing its relevance and will be discontinued sooner or later. However, the situation didn’t end up as expected, and OpenStack is right now experiencing a kind of new birth thanks to cloud computing.

​What is OpenStack?

For those who want to refresh the context, OpenStack is an open-source infrastructure platform developed for creating private clouds. It allows to convert resources available on separate physical machines into pools of resources, that can be used for the development of cloud infrastructure.OpenStack was launched about a decade ago and enjoyed a period of great popularity. Nevertheless, some years ago it started to lose ground to such platforms as AWS and Microsoft Azure. The reason for that was that OpenStack required owning physical infrastructure, which required a great deal of expenses. AWS and Microsoft Azure as public clouds seemed way easier solutions in this regard.

The current state of OpenStack

Despite a certain drop in popularity, OpenStack preserved its extensive open-source community, being actively developed further.

OpenStack also fully switched to Kubernets, which made OpenStack much more suitable for projects involving containerization.

Generally speaking, even now OpenStack is in fact prospering.

The perspectives of OpenStack

The current trends in cloud computing let us suppose that demand for OpenStack will increase in the near future. This prognosis has the following motivations:

​The shift to multi-clouds

Multi-cloud solutions, when a company uses not a single cloud but combines several cloud solutions to build its overall infrastructure, are becoming increasingly popular. Therefore, instead of opting for one major public cloud solution, companies are likely to choose several smaller cloud providers whose clouds may be based on OpenStack.

Cloud repatriation

Another cloud trend that can be clearly noticed nowadays is the so-called cloud repatriation — many companies, that started on public clouds, tend to build their own cloud infrastructure in their own data centers.

Facilitating of OpenStack’s interface

Another obstacle to the diffusion of OpenStack used to be its complex interface. With this in mind, Canonical is going to launch a new project called Sunbeam, that will facilitate starting with OpenStack for a much broader audience.

​The continuous interest of vendors

Despite the noticeable decrease in popularity a few years ago, major software vendors like Red Hat, Canonical, and Mirantis preserved their interest in involving OpenStack and supporting it.