OpenStack news

The Register takes note of the annual OpenStack Summit and surveys the state of the OpenStack nation: Inside OpenStack: Gifted, troubled project that wants to clobber Amazon

With their typical snark, The Register tell it like it is:

Though many bill OpenStack as "the Linux of the cloud", the technology so far fails to meet the expectations of usability and compatibility that defines the Linux community, though it is improving rapidly.

Ouch! Now, that's faint praise indeed!

On a more technical level, it seems that the largest problems are in the networking arena:

Another issue that is endemic to both within-compute networking (Nova) and the standalone in-development networking module (Neutron), is that for single-host and flat networks, the IP allocation, IP routing, NAT, DHCP, and OpenStack metadata services are in a single chunk of code making them difficult to interface with, while in a multi-host format the services are distributed across hypervisors presenting a much larger attack surface.

At the OpenStack Summit website, it's revealing to browse through the talks, to get a sense for the current priorities of the community.

Many of the component technologies are maturing fast, but it's still early days for OpenStack. The degree of interest in the conference is promising, but it's awfully hard to see this sort of fractured coalition catching up to the giants of the cloud.

Still, this is the way Open Source software works: it's messy, it's chaotic, it can be hard to figure out what's happening, or where it's going. Yet nonetheless the process works, and the software improves.