The state of OpenStack in 2022

Hangover

Conclusions

Much achieved, much to do – that is my conclusion with regard to OpenStack after a little more than 12 years of project history. What started life as a cooperation between NASA and Rackspace has become a comprehensive platform for private clouds with high standards.

However, not just OpenStack has changed, but also the industry's take on the project. It is no longer the case that the smallest service providers are trying to join the OpenStack circus, because the solution is now considered a professional tool for large environments. One concern for some is that it has also significantly reduced the number of vendors with OpenStack products in their portfolio. Apart from Canonical and Red Hat, none of the big vendors offer a serious OpenStack distribution.

Resistance is brewing. Kurt Garloff, who is very well connected in the open source and OpenStack scene, has been working for some time on his Sovereign Cloud Stack (SCS) [1], which is based on OpenStack at its core (Figure 5) and is intended to enable data sovereignty by operating in a company's own cloud. (See the article on SCS in this issue.) Garloff has already found some helpers, and the technical development of SCS is certainly something that whets your appetite for more. Competition and diversity don't hurt, so here's hoping SCS can establish itself as an alternative to the big two and help OpenStack gain new momentum.