Data and Announcements Roll in from OpenStack Summit

This week's OpenStack Summit in Austin, TX, has brought many interesting announcements on, with clear evidence that large organizations are embracing the open cloud platform. "Change is always a challenge in technology," several analysts noted in a Summit report fom Silicon Angle. 

Here are many of the latest announcements of note from one of the biggest cloud-focused events of the year.

The OpenStack Security Project. This is an ongoing effort to focus on what some consider to be OpenStack's weak point: security.  Robert Clark, leader of the project, provided many new updates here.

Expect Changes in the Big Tent. Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth went on record this week saying the core OpenStack Project will march on, but the "Big Tent" model, where many disparate open projects are wrapped into OpenStack, will end. Get the details here.

Research Shows Growth. There was a lot of data rolled out at the Summit.  Al Sadowski, research director at 451 Research, said 2015 OpenStack ecosystem revenue came in at $1.2 billion and forecasted that it will grow to $3.37 billion by 2018. Meanwhile, according to survey results from The OpenStack Foundation, 65 percent of OpenStack deployments are now in production, which is 33 percent more than a year ago.

Stackanetes. If you're wondering if that word is supposed to resemble "Kubernetes," it certainly is. CoreOS announced Stackanetes at the Summit as a way to use OpenStack and Kubernetes (Google's open source container management solution, which we covered here) together. With it, users will be able to use CoreOS' Tectonic tool to deploy and manage an OpenStack cloud. ""Stackanetes containerizes OpenStack and includes upstream Kubernetes and upstream OpenStack to deliver dynamic management, self-healing deployments and painless upgrades," according to the company.

Red Hat's OpenStack Onslaught. Red Hat is deriving an increasing amount of its revenues from its focus on OpenStack, and the company made a number of related announcements at the Summit. The company announced that leading organizations across Europe, including Fastweb, Paddy Power Betfair, and Produban, have deployed Red Hat OpenStack Platform as the backbone of their cloud initiatives. Research firm IDC noted in early 2015, “As European enterprises enter the most critical phase in the 3rd Platform era – the innovation phase, they want new, yet cost-effective technologies to bring their ideas to fruition. Their desire to avoid vendor lock-ins, and reduce software licensing fees are steering them to evaluate OpenStack for building their cloud infrastructures.”

Red Hat has also announced that Cambridge University and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have selected the company for their OpenStack initiatives. Red Hat has also been striving to get its OpenStack initiatives and its NFV work adopted by telecom companies, and Verizon has signed on. Clearly, Red Hat is moving squarely into the cloud computing business.

Getting OpenStack Certified. The OpenStack Foundation also announced the availability of its new Certified OpenStack Administrator (COA) exam, which will validate skills for cloud administrators and help employers identify qualified candidates. First announced in October 2015 at OpenStack Summit Tokyo, the COA program is part of the OpenStack Foundation’s strategic efforts to grow the cloud computing talent pool. We covered the news here.

The Service-based Approach.  Platform9 also had interesting news at the Summit. has announced a new release of its Platform9 Managed OpenStack, which is a SaaS-based solution with integration for single sign-on (SSO) solutions. The company also updated its private-cloud-as-a service offering from OpenStack Juno to OpenStack Liberty. 

"Our goal at Platform9 is to deliver OpenStack in a way that is both enterprise-ready and easy to use," said Madhura Maskasky, Platform9 co-founder and vice president of products. "Our new release of Platform9 makes OpenStack even easier, giving our customers robust private cloud capabilities without the complications and hassle that often accompany OpenStack deployments and prevent customers from enjoying its powerful benefits."