OpenStack, which turned 4 years old this summer, began as a twinkle in Scott Sanchez's eyes. He was determined to turn the fledgling Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform he helped create into a thriving resource for public and private clouds.
OpenStack is an open source project. Its technology consists of a series of interrelated projects that provide users with the ability to create and manage both public and private cloud operations.
OpenStack Guru Scott Sanchez is
vice president of strategy at MetaCloud.
vice president of strategy at MetaCloud.
Partnering with NASA, Rackspace Hosting launched the project in 2010. Since then, OpenStack has grown into a global software community of developers collaborating on a standard and scalable open source cloud operating system.
Sanchez joined Rackspace in early 2011 and was part of the team that developed OpenStack. He was intimately involved with building out the OpenStack ecosystem.
"My mission was simple. It was to make OpenStack win. My goal was always to make OpenStack a viable commercial alternative, even though it was open source," Sanchez told LinuxInsider.
He recently brought his passion for growing the OpenStack ecosystem to MetaCloud, where as vice president of strategy, he continues to promote its adoption. OpenStack's growth strategy relies on differentiating it from the competition and helping the market to understand what OpenStack is all about.
In this exclusive interview, LinuxInsider discusses with Sanchez his vision for OpenStack technology and the impact he sees OpenStack making in the market.
LinuxInsider: What strategy did you implement to push adoption of OpenStack?
Scott Sanchez: I always took the view, whenever I talked to hosting company providers and network providers and others, to help them understand what the value of this was. Once that started going well, I moved my focus to the users. The question was the same for me. How do we get across to the big companies and the small companies the value of OpenStack? How do I convince them that the shift of open source and the community brings value to them and their business. That is where my focus has been for the last number of years.
LI: Why is OpenStack so important?
Sanchez: From day one, the idea behind OpenStack was to give people an alternative that was truly open. When you look back to 2010 and 2011, your choices for what people thought was cloud were AWS and VMware. The idea that there could be a truly open alternative -- the way Linux back in the 1990s was starting to become mainstream -- was powerful. The idea of cloud is not infrastructure. It is really about how you use those resources. It is about how you can build and adapt applications to take advantage of resources and automation and APIs and all of these things that are so core to what people want to be doing.
LI: How close to making that idea a reality have you come?
Sanchez: The idea back then was to provide all of the infrastructure code necessary in an open way so that people can move their mindsets from the infrastructure that we have all been in for so long to the application mindset where the future is heading. Now, four years later, we have ... something like 17,000 members of the OpenStack community and something like over 400 companies in 140 countries. I think that people have more than shown that the idea back in 2010-2011
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