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The open-source OpenStack Foundation isn’t just out to remake the cloud; it’s also trying to do its part to help enable a new software-defined economy as well. That’s one of the key messages that emerged from the OpenStack Juno Summit that was held May 12-16 in Atlanta.
In a video interview at the Summit, executives from the OpenStack Foundation detailed why the software-defined economy matters and where OpenStack fits in. The OpenStack Foundation isn’t just building cloud technology infrastructure either; it is also building the infrastructure technology needed to coordinate and build OpenStack itself.
“No matter what size your organization is, it just has to move faster now,” Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, said. “Things are really shifting in the global economy, and to keep the competitive edge, IT is just becoming more and more critical.”
The idea of the software-defined economy, where speed and software deployment agility are the foundation, is something that OpenStack aims to enable for organizations of all sizes. In the software-defined economy, software, and not hardware, is the key to success.
“Every single company is trying to figure out how to leverage their developers,” Bryce said.
OpenStack is primarily an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) technology effort that involves the efforts of over a thousand active developers. OpenStack is also building its own infrastructure technology to build IaaS, with the Storyboard project.
“There is a lot of tooling the community has worked on to be able to support the growth in developers and projects,” Bryce said.
Bryce noted that a key challenge that OpenStack has faced is how to coordinate efforts across multiple projects and the distributed developer base. That’s where the Storyboard project comes in, which got started six months ago.
“The plan is to eventually have it [Storyboard] be the standard requirements gathering system,” Bryce said.
Watch the full video interview with Jonathan Bryce and Mark Collier, chief operating officer of the OpenStack Foundation, below:
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist