No Cloud left behind

Austin, Bexar, Cactus, Diablo, Essex, Folsom, Grizzly, Havanna, Icehouse, Juno, Kilo, Liberty, Mitaka, Newton, Ocata .... Pike in the makings, Queens in the horizon (small h) and R being named.

Almost 7 years of innovation, the millions of lines of code, and thousands of contributors from hundreds of companies and dozens of projects (not all of them usable). I am sure you will get all the accurate numbers from the OpenStack Foundation team in the coming Design Summit, our gathering taking place every six months where we, the community, celebrate success, we make our announcements and look at each other from the corner of the eye. Party time

But, at the risk of being called a killjoy, there is a fact that should worry us, the community, more. Are we, the community, really making all this innovation available to the enterprises and telcos out there? I can tell you that we, at Ubuntu, have a fixation to do so. It's our DNA. It's how we do things. Can't help ourselves. We also release every six months, and we have exhausted the alphabet with the release of Ubuntu 17.04. So we know about making technology available at this fast pace.

So here's the facts. The following table shows the adoption of OpenStack’s software releases over time, disclosed in the latest OpenStack Foundation survey for the Newton release.

And here's for Ocata, from the latest report

There is a very large percentage of the production clouds running on old (to very old) versions of OpenStack. Only about 10% of the environments are in the latest version of OpenStack. And 65% has not been updated in the last year. There is even some Essex still running!. So why are we missing on all the innovation? Why are customers (or users) locked in a version of a no lock-in platform?

At Canonical we have realized that designing OpenStack and operating it is hard, time consuming and ultimately expensive, talent is scarce and upgrades are difficult. We get it, and we react to this. It's what we worry about. These are the problems we have been solving for our customers since 2012, in that summit in San Diego where Mark made a live demo of an OpenStack upgrade onstage: Essex to Folsom, in 3 minutes. And since then, we have only become better at it!

No Cloud left behind

And as we start delivering the first Ocata clouds, we'd like to make this goodness available to all other OpenStack customers out there who are stuck in old versions of OpenStack, and to those companies that are hesitating in making the move from their proprietary virtualization platform or their public cloud because of the fear of getting into this particular version of lock-in. And we do this in 3 steps:

1. Let us find the right hardware for your workload. We work with your vendor of choice to make that procurement process easy and provide you with the certainty you need. We are hardware agnostic, we will look for the best value for the dollar (see example with Supermicro)
2. Get yourself a healthy bootstack cloud. A cloud that is designed to succeed, to grow, to run many different workloads and to evolve (upgrade) overtime while giving you the best economics. Fully managed by Canonical OpenStack experts and backed by our SLA, so you only need to worry about your business. No cloud left behind.
3. Let's plan end execute your workload migration with Coriolis, the cloud migration as a service tool from our partner Cloudbase. Whether you are running your workloads in your old version of OpenStack, VMWare, a public cloud or any combination of the above, we will assess and execute a migration to your new cloud.

So we made it easy for you, no excuses. Don't be the guy who shows up in Boston with a Kilo or Juno cloud. Don't be the guy who can't implement DPDK because you're still running Icehouse. Don't be the guy who is still overpaying in a public cloud environment because you can't get your OpenStack project running. Don't be the guy who invests 20% of his IT budget to employ 15 engineers just to run a 50 node (and very expensive) cloud.

Call us, and we will make it happen. Be proud of your cloud