This article is based on a piece originally published on TechBeacon. Original post date: February 2020.
OpenStack Is Not Dead—It Has Matured
When SUSE announced it was exiting the OpenStack market, it reignited familiar speculation that the technology was sliding toward irrelevance. That speculation misses the point. OpenStack’s alleged decline has become one of the tech industry’s most persistent—and least accurate—tropes.
The infrastructure-as-a-service model for hosting private clouds was heavily hyped in the early-to-mid 2010s. Some observers unfairly positioned it as a wholesale alternative to public clouds. When reality fell short of those inflated expectations, OpenStack gained a reputation for being complex and labor-intensive—a reputation that prevented many proof-of-concept projects from ever reaching production.
More recently, Kubernetes was frequently described as overtaking OpenStack as the most important cloud technology. This framing is a misperception. OpenStack and Kubernetes are not competing technologies—they are complementary ones. OpenStack manages infrastructure; Kubernetes orchestrates containerized applications running on top of that infrastructure. Kubernetes remains, in fact, one of the top workloads running on OpenStack.
SUSE’s departure reflects a business strategy decision, not a verdict on OpenStack’s long-term relevance. The technology has emerged from the “trough of disillusionment” phase of the hype cycle and is finding sustained, growing relevance in enterprise private clouds and multi-cloud architectures.
Who Still Relies on OpenStack?
Major enterprises across industries continue to run OpenStack at scale. Reported users include AT&T, Verizon, and China Mobile in telecommunications; Walmart and Target in retail; and organizations such as Nike, Bloomberg, American Airlines, and Volkswagen AG. According to figures cited by the OpenStack Foundation, even users who also employ the three major public clouds dedicate an average of 58% of their infrastructure to OpenStack.
The OpenStack community—one of the open-source world’s most active—has invested heavily in addressing the complexity and operational challenges that once held the platform back. Day-2 operations (ongoing management, patching, scaling, and monitoring after initial deployment) have improved significantly, and this maturation is a primary driver of OpenStack’s continued enterprise traction.
Seven Lessons from 100+ Private Cloud Deployments
Based on experience implementing more than 100 private cloud builds, the following seven practices separate successful OpenStack deployments from those that stall in proof-of-concept.
1. Prioritize Automation from Day One
OpenStack once carried a reputation for demanding excessive manual effort. That has changed. Modern OpenStack implementations—including those built on model-driven operators such as Juju charms—can automate common operational tasks like scaling out compute nodes without adding architectural complexity. Treat automation as a first-class requirement, not an afterthought.
2. Keep the Architecture Simple
Resist the temptation to over-engineer. A solid OpenStack architecture collocates control-plane services with compute, storage, and networking on the same nodes rather than isolating each function on dedicated hardware. Machine containers make this colocation effective and flexible, and allow microservices to be moved or scaled without redesigning the whole stack.
3. Invest in Logging, Monitoring, and Alerting (LMA)
Integrate OpenStack with a robust LMA stack from the start. OpenStack can be connected to a range of third-party and open-source solutions for centralized logging, metrics collection, and automated alerting. A well-implemented LMA layer reduces the human effort required to keep the environment healthy and dramatically shortens mean time to detect and resolve issues.
4. Avoid Building Snowflakes
Custom, one-off configurations—often called “snowflakes”—are expensive to build and even more expensive to maintain. Standardize your component choices and architecture patterns. A repeatable, well-understood reference architecture is far easier to operate, upgrade, and hand off between teams than a bespoke design that only one engineer fully understands.
5. Build for Repeatability and Reusability
Choose an OpenStack deployment methodology—whether that’s Ansible playbooks, Juju bundles, or another tool—that allows you to redeploy the same environment reliably across different hardware or sites. If you have deployed once correctly, you should be able to replicate that deployment with minimal rework. This capability is critical for disaster recovery, test environments, and multi-site expansion.
6. Simplify Your Hardware Bill of Materials
In most OpenStack deployments, a single, standardized bill of materials for hardware is sufficient. Resist the urge to introduce hardware heterogeneity unless there is a clear, measurable benefit. A uniform hardware base simplifies driver management, capacity planning, and vendor support relationships—and usually optimizes cost efficiency at scale.
7. Design Your Container Strategy for Multi-Cloud Portability
If Kubernetes is part of your platform strategy—and for most organizations it should be—choose a Kubernetes distribution that can run consistently across OpenStack, public clouds (AWS, Azure, GCP), and VMware. This portability is the practical definition of multi-cloud, and it ensures you avoid vendor lock-in at the orchestration layer while still leveraging OpenStack’s infrastructure capabilities where they make economic sense.
OpenStack and Kubernetes: Complementary, Not Competing
The framing of OpenStack versus Kubernetes is a false choice. These technologies operate at different layers of the stack and solve different problems. OpenStack provides the infrastructure foundation—compute, storage, networking, and identity services—while Kubernetes schedules and manages containerized workloads on top of that infrastructure. In multi-cloud environments, both have well-defined, non-overlapping roles.
Organizations that understand this relationship are deploying both together successfully. Those still treating the two as rivals are likely missing opportunities to build a coherent, cost-effective private cloud strategy.
The Bottom Line
OpenStack’s first decade was a roller coaster, but the platform that exists today is significantly more mature, more automatable, and more operationally manageable than it was in 2014. The enterprises running it at scale—across telecom, retail, finance, and manufacturing—are not doing so out of inertia. They are doing so because, when deployed correctly, OpenStack delivers a cost-effective, open-source infrastructure foundation that integrates cleanly into modern multi-cloud and cloud-native architectures.
The key is getting the deployment right. Follow the seven principles above, resist the urge to over-customize, and invest in automation and observability from the start.