8 Considerations Worth Noting When Choosing OpenStack For Your Cloud

OpenStack is emerging as the go-to cloud platform for many companies, due in large part to its open, flexible architecture. But running OpenStack takes skills.

With new releases improving the platform’s overall stability, it has become more viable for enterprises to run their mission-critical applications on OpenStack clouds. According to a report by Forrester, 50 percent of Fortune 100 companies already are using OpenStack, and about two-thirds of those users are running production workloads.

OpenStack’s open APIs make it easy to integrate with numerous solutions. This gives organizations the flexibility to add components from multiple vendors onto their deployments. Earlier this year, 18 major vendors successfully completed IBM’s Interop Challenge, proving that OpenStack distributions are interoperable with their offerings across on-premises, public and hybrid deployments.

Deploying OpenStack straight from source code is an involved, time-consuming task, even for experienced IT operators. Knowing what deployment model best suits your needs can help alleviate the complexities of installation. Users can choose from one of several deployment models, including on-premises distribution, private cloud in a box, hosted private cloud and managed OpenStack as a service.

Since its launch in 2010, more than 500 companies have formally joined the OpenStack project. Combined with the broader open-source community, OpenStack gives users viable resources such as extensive documentation and thousands of fellow developers to leverage for advice when encountering issues with their deployments.

Last month at OpenStack Summit Barcelona 2016, hybrid cloud as a service was formally introduced to the user community. Organizations now can automatically connect their private OpenStack clouds to public clouds such as Amazon Web Services, and run hybrid deployments via single standardized OpenStack APIs. According to OpenStack’s most recent user survey, hybrid cloud was one of the most sought-after technologies.

OpenStack offers self-service provisioning for engineers, which allows quick innovation, autonomous scaling and reconfiguration of deployments when necessary. By eliminating gridlocks from IT processes, organizations can improve their DevOps workflows.

OpenStack easily integrates with other cloud-native technologies, including Google Kubernetes, which has emerged as the front-runner in the container orchestrator market. According to the most recent OpenStack survey, 42 percent of users are managing their applications with Kubernetes.

Upgrading to the latest version of OpenStack often is a challenging process. Many organizations are hesitant to shift their workloads to the latest OpenStack release for fear of unexpected downtimes. Having your OpenStack deployment managed by a third party that handles upgrades greatly reduces any risk of data loss or other issues.