From the ‘Purveyors of the TRUTH’ files:
BOSTON. This morning I was on a panel at the Red Hat Summit with Scott Merrill from TechCrunch and Jon Brodkin from Ars Technica with moderation from 451 Groups John Abbot.
Officially the session was titled, “Hot Off the Press: Top Journalists on Today’s Tech Trends” but it really could have just been called – What Do You Want to Ask a Linux Journalist?
We had about 60 people or so in the room and the primary topic of discussion – not surprisingly – was cloud . Also not surprising is the fact that no one in the audience had actually deployed an OpenStack cloud. Considering that this is a Red Hat conference, that’s not terribly surprising either – since Red Hat’s full product is not yet available.
We got a lot of questions about VMware and competition and questions about why people move to the cloud.
There were questions about vendor lock-in and choice – which was interesting. Open Source of course means that code is open but hey if you can’t support that code yourself – or find someone that can – isn’t that a form of lock-in too?
A Financial Analyst that was in the session peppered us with a bunch of really great questions about the market and dynamics for IaaS, PaaS and if the model for sales/support need to change (it does). Cloud isn’t just server, and server isn’t just server anymore either. In the Software Defined era, where storage, networking and compute co-exist and are ephemeral at times skill and support models must evolve.
Desktop Linux was not a concern for anyone in the audience – no one was using it apparently – which is a shame because I think that Red Hat’s move to embrace GNOME Classic is a very good thing.
The bottom line for me though – is there is a tremendous amount of confusion and mis-understanding about what the cloud is and what OpenStack is. And there is still some herniation from users about it until the model plays out..
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
