Friday, January 31, 2014

On avoiding vendor lock-in by leveraging Openstack

One of the main drivers for user to adopt Openstack is to avoid vendor lock-in (see stats here ).

Architecture is rapidly becoming a commodity

Arguably, if you develop you own cloud solution you are locking yourself into yourself. Openstack in its current state require so much effort, customization, and maintenance that you end up building your own cage. Managing your maintenance and devs cost becomes critical in order to have a good ROI. Unless you plan to resell these services or expose them directly to your customers you won't benefit from the scaling strategy.

Often you might be better off  with a vendor lock-in as you "should" more easily control your costs and ROI. Or better, contract out your Openstack implementation from a third party and outsource the maintenance and development cost while retaining a certain degree of flexibility.

Different size , different strategy different risks

SMB customers can be very aggressive about getting into the cloud, and they do not have a legacy to deal with, whereas the enterprises tend to be very risk-averse. They have to protect what they have, and they cannot be as aggressive.

As a result we are seeing a number of mature enterprises looking toward a multicloud strategy. Whether that is through multiple platforms or whether it's deploying on an open cloud platform, the outcome that they are trying to achieve is the same. Enterprises are increasingly transitioning from general-purpose tools to point solutions as their IT environments become bigger and more complex.