OpenStack is Disrutpive: But in a Good Way

The OpenStack Summit in Austin, TX saw a huge turnout this year. Along with a ton of big-name keynote speakers there were a large number of new technologies introduced at the show. It was also a show about adoption as huge organization after huge organization have taken the plunge into the OpenStack pool.

While there is plenty of work to be done on OpenStack, it has reached the point where it is "good enough" for many organizations. The massive cost savings, SDLC acceleration and innovation enablement OpenStack delivers make it a winner for forward thinking organizations that are willing to endure change.

Donna Scott of Gartner Group was one of the first key-note speakers at the event. Donna's explanations of Bimodal IT was intriguing and enlightening at the same time. She explained that in Bimodal IT"

• Mode 1 applications are mission critical. They must be predictable and reliable, with little change and lots of governance. Think SAP or Oracle Financials.
• Mode 2 applications, on the other hand, are your more innovative applications. These applications change frequently and don’t necessarily need to be so reliable because you’re not running your business on them. Think web-based marketing applications or systems working with metadata (data about data).

Typically, Mode 1 applications are your traditional applications running on expensive high availability clusters or systems (i.e. mainframe for example). Your Mode 2 applications can be in a public or private cloud like OpenStack, but Donna's point was that as Mode 2 applications typically need to communicate with Mode 1 applications

As Mode 2 apps get greater adoption, they themselves need greater predictability and reliability. Over time Mode 2 applications can easily end up becoming Mode 1 applications. It’s a model that calls for greater use of Mode 2 strategies for more than just Agile IT.

Future Mode 1 applications will be dependent upon reliability and performance one gains by horizontally scaling applications across the infrastructure like what OpenStack delivers. Organizations can avoid expensive monolithic vertically scaled infrastructure while still enjoy the comfort of know the applications will scale to whatever workload is thrown at them and be able to achieve 100% availability despite hardware outages.

Another interesting speaker at the event was Jonathan Bryce of the OpenStack Foundation. Jonathan discussed how OpenStack was at the center of the disruption of IT. As an example of this disruption, see how Intel turned their IT organization on its head and in the process implemented self-service provisioning reducing provisioning times from 90 days to thirty minutes while saving $21 million (to date).

Jonathan noted that change is terrifying for many organizations. But it can also be a huge opportunity for organizations and individual who are willing to drive change for a positive outcome. The key point Jonathan made was for all of these technologies, and all of these priorities to work together. As an orchestration tool that is high configurable and allows for self-service provisioning OpenStack is at the top of heap of technologies organizations should be focused on as the remold IT for the next generation of applications and application developers. He

He talked about the three keys to handling diversity:

• Embrace different technologies;
• Understand that new apps still need old apps to be useful;
• Culture is still more important than technology.

The disruption them continued with speaker Boris Renski of Mirantis. Boris had a different take on how disruption was driving IT innovation.He mentioned that recent Garner survey indicate that 95% of private cloud implementations had problems — but interestingly enough only a small fraction of the problems had anything to do with the OpenStack technology. The rest were all about either people or processes. To effectively use OpenStack, you must change the culture and it one of the reasons we offer an all-inclusive turnkey OpenStack solution that removes the variability of an installation and increase the chances of success (had to get one commercial message in :) )

As you may have read in recent articles, AT&T has made a commitment to OpenStack in a big way. They signed a support contract with Mirantis for 500,000 physical servers of OpenStack to be deployed between now and 2020. To date they have deployed over 70 OpenStack clusters and hundreds of servers with the goal of replacing 75% of their current hardware network technology with software versions running and scaling on OpenStack.

Sorabh Saxena, SVP, Software Development and Engineering of AT&T — which won this year’s SuperUser award — discussed the ways in which the company is using OpenStack to completely virtualize all of its services. They are replacing traditional hardware with software-based versions of the same technology that run on OpenStack. The elasticity and the ability to spread application risk across many pieces of hardware makes it an ideal platform for services that grow and grow and grow that can never be down.

AT&T has seen tremendous growth -  over 150,000% bandwidth usage growth in the last few years (yes, you read that right!) and without OpenStack they would have been in a world of hurt (and their customers would have paid the bill). In fact, it is very likely they would not have been able to keep up with the demand - a worse case scenario that executive management does not want to hear from and IT organization.

Another day one speaker was the General Manager and Global Head of IoT and Innovation GTM at SAP, Nayaki Nayyar, . She related about how the company runs their Internet of Things (IoT) on OpenStack, and how their customers care about outcomes, rather than technology.

Nayaki gave several great examples of how companies are rethinking their business and how the underlying IT infrastructure needs to be adaptive. Her samples included a company that sells compressed air canisters that has changed its business model so that really, what they’re selling is compressed air. A tire company is selling Mileage as a Service. UnderArmor is selling fitness, rather than fitness equipment.

Like a lot of companies they have grown through acquisition. They own one of everything! The company has 23 different cloud architectures inherited and they are in the process of standardizing on OpenStack. More than that, however, the company’s customers are using OpenStack for their IoT projects (through SAP HANA), and Nayyar gave the example of a company that uses the OpenStack-based application to keep track of thousands of sensors in an automated factory.

The final key-note speaker for day of the OpenStack Summit was Mario Müller from Volkswagen group, who discussed how VW is using OpenStack to fundamentally change how the automotive behemoth does business. They recently announced their intent to build the largest OpenStack network in th world and also have recently signed a support contract with Mirantis (an OpenStack:Ready partner). In addition to streamlining workflow and reducing costs, the company will be using OpenStack in its plan to build not just connected cars, but autonomous, self-driving cars that can get you where you want to go without human intervention.

If you're an innovator and believe disruption can drive a positive change in your organization please feel free to contact. I would be happy to explain how other companies are leveraging open source (free) technology like OpenStack to drive down costs, accelerate application development and deliver a better outcome for you customers.

I am an Open Networker and accept all invitations to connection on LinkedIn. Visit our website at https://www.openstackready.com for more info about our all-inclusive turnkey solution.