As an industry analyst, I get queried around OpenStack software from potential customers and industry peers. Despite the improvements in maturity and stability OpenStack software, potential customers field questions around its maturity and stability even now, which shows the perception existing around the OpenStack software.
As someone who has followed OpenStack software for more than five years now, as someone who has delivered private clouds based on OpenStack software to customers and as someone with intimate knowledge of OpenStack internals, I have well-formed opinions about capabilities and limitations of OpenStack software.
With these credentials and as someone who is also observing rapid shifts in industry trends, I would like to ask the OpenStack community of following questions.
- How would you explain the value proposition of OpenStack software succinctly? Bonus if it’s less than 140 characters.
- Who should consider OpenStack software and what are the top 3 reasons to consider OpenStack software?
- How many customers are running production workloads on OpenStack software now?
- On a scale of 1–10 (10 being the best experience), how do you rate deployment experience, operational experience, maturity, and stability of OpenStack software now?
- On a scale of 1–10 (10 being the most successful), how do you rate the success of OpenStack governance model?
Why am I asking these?
To any project, what ultimately matters is customer success. As an engineer and as an architect, I might have answers to these questions, but as an analyst, I would like to open up discussions here. If discussions around these questions contribute towards customer success, even in a limited amount, I would consider my efforts successful.
[Updated to include operational experience in question #4, thanks to @mbrown_atx]