OpenStack itself still faces some challenges, including cloud portability issues. While there are multiple vendors that provide OpenStack based cloud services, moving data across those clouds isn’t quite as easy as it should be.
“OpenStack, as a community, is working on a solution to portability, starting with the image layer, through a project called OpenStack Image Service (code named Glance),” Mark Collier, VP of marketing and business development at Rackspace, told InternetNews.com. Collier added that one of the key features on the roadmap is an image translation service to convert between formats that will be a key enabler for inter-OpenStack cloud portability.
Overall, the growth of multiple commercial implementations of OpenStack is a good thing according to Collier.
“We were very deliberate in the choice of Apache as the open source license for OpenStack, to encourage commercial efforts around it,” Collier said.