OpenStack in Action - Maturity of Open Stack?

[Magnus Eriksson]

What is the maturity of Open Stack today for serious production use cases - can it be at all compared to for instance AWS?

[Tim Holloway]

Openstack was originally developed by RackSpace - which is a major ISP - and NASA, which generally doesn't fool around when it comes to computers. Among the current supporters can be numbered Red Hat, IBM, AT&T, RackSpace and HP. PayPal supposedly runs on OpenStack and a number of other major companies use it to a greater or lesser degree.

So I'd say that there are some serious production use cases out there and have been for some time now.

[Cody Bumgardner]

There should be no question that core OpenStack components in and of themselves are ready for serious production use cases. That being said, you need either a strong internal team and/or a good vendor partnership for a major OpenStack deployment.

As Tim said, Backspace contributed early object store (Swift) components and NASA contributed Nebula (Nova), which later became the foundation for OpenStack.

Here is a nice historical OpenStack timeline: http://www.tiki-toki.com/timeline/entry/138134/OpenStack-History/#vars!date=2010-06-06_16:33:46!

There are tons of notable and very serious OpenStack use cases (https://www.openstack.org/user-stories/) including Walmart (https://www.openstack.org/summit/vancouver-2015/summit-videos/presentation/walmart-and-039s-cloud-journey), CERN (https://www.openstack.org/user-stories/cern/) and many others across many verticals.