Happy Birthday, OpenStack! Now Change

OpenStack turns three this month and some say the project needs to mature

As OpenStack celebrates its third birthday this month, some project backers are reflecting on just how far the project has progressed, while pundits are saying that unless it makes some major changes, there may be less to celebrate in years to come.

Since NASA and Rackspace joined to launch the open source project in the summer of 2010, the promise of OpenStack has been to create a platform for service providers to build public clouds and end users to deploy private clouds that would all be interoperable, creating the hybrid cloud nirvana.

Execution has been “largely underwhelming” in the area of interoperability though, says David Linthicum, a consultant with Cloud Technology Partners. Progress is being made, but a Rackspace OpenStack cloud and those from a host of other providers in the project will not be inherently interoperable. [...]