A unified OpenStack for a scalable open infrastructure

Stu Miniman and John Boyer of theCUBE interviewed Mark Baker, Field Product Manager, Canonical at the OpenStack Summit in Vancouver. Read on to to find out about OpenStack’s increasing maturity.

The Kubernetes and OpenStack story isn’t simple. Challenges exist, and plenty of pathfinding still needs to take place when it comes to Kubernetes.

Customers want to take different approaches with how they want to plug together OpenStack components in order to create a unified stack is complex. Some customers want Kubernetes running alongside OpenStack, or on top of OpenStack, or even OpenStack running on Kubernetes.

Standardising on reference architectures for combinations of OpenStack plus Kubernetes, for example, then building and testing with hardware and software partners helps Canonical to ensure that, “we’re able to deliver that as a standalone product as required, but also as effectively solutions together, that are fully integrated, fully supportable, and they’re going to deliver the capability that the customer needs,” said Baker.

OpenStack Maturity

One of the fundamental themes underpinning the OpenStack Summit in Vancouver was the maturity of the open infrastructure.

However, whilst maturity is increasing, there remains complexity and a need for vendors to provide customers with additional help when requested.

Canonical’s BootStack offering, a fully managed OpenStack service was primarily created as a way of addressing the skills gap within the community. Since its inception there has been a lot of companies interested in deploying OpenStack but unable to find the talent, or the people with the experience of deploying and managing OpenStack.

For Canonical, this was a blocker in delivering clouds to customers. So a managed service that combines reference architectures and best practices became a key facilitator in getting customers up and running in as little as two weeks with two engineers and managing it for them until they are comfortable to take control themselves.

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