Impact of OpenStack in Emerging Markets

OpenStackDay India 2015 brought together the top minds contributing to OpenStack community from India. Thanks to Mark Collier, COO, OpenStack foundation, Tom Fifield, Openstack Community Manager, Alan Clark Chairman of OpenStack board/SuSE & Philip Williams, Chief Architect from RackSpace to fly to India to make this event more memorable and valuable.

It was a privilege to be a invited for the panel discussion. Many thanks to the organising committee for inviting me ! The discussion brought out some of the interesting facts on how Emerging Markets look at cloud and how OpenStack can play a major role. Here is my take on this : First, Why is it important to us ?
As per Cisco’s global cloud index, there would be 1.5 zettabytes of cloud data exchanged annually by 2016 just in the emerging Asian market. Well, that is a huge !
In order to understand the market, let us split the market in to two. (a) Enterprises (b) SMBs . In both the market segments, e-commerce and exceedingly demanding customer base are driving innovation to maximise efficiency and minimise the cost. In other words, consumerization of the technology is pushing the technology to the next level. Say a consumer of mobile TV can imagine the QoS being allocated on demand based on the type of the application that is being viewed. To meet these customer expectations, high speed networks, Software Defined Networks (SDN) and the cloud based service models become the key enablers.

Enterprise Market

Way back in 2008, netPCs were common in India where consumers used to buy virtualised PCs over the internet from a Telco provider. In 2012, Telcos started offering pay-as-you-go model. Now we are in a hybrid world. Some of the top telco providers like Bharthi Airtel, Vodafone, BSNL, Reliance either transform a telco resources in to telco cloud or partner with other Cloud Service providers to expand their offerings in other regions. Bharti Airtel has partnered with AWS providing high bandwidth and low cost connectivity to Cloud consumers in India through AWS direct connect. Vodafone with primary cloud existence in UK, is looking to expand its offerings to other regions like Africa, Italy & Spain. What becomes essential in these scenarios is to enable Hybrid Cloud interoperability.

ie., interoperability across different flavours of OpenStack from different vendors, interoperability across other cloud services like AWS, vCloud. In addition, the SLAs need be managed across these interoperable clouds.

Thus the two very important considerations for this market segment are:

1. Hybrid cloud & interoperability
2. Policy based workload management

Note: Apart from Telcos, government initiatives like e-governance and UID (Aadhar) initiatives in India are other mega cloud initiatives.

SMB Market

With mobile broad band & 4G network revolutionising the e-commerce industry, retail, finance companies are looking at web enabling their application delivery.

We are looking at a $15 billion market by 2016 with 100 million shoppers making online purchases. Cloud is an obvious choice to handle peak loads and faster application delivery.

Why OpenStack fits the bill ?

Considering these two market segments, here are some of my thoughts on why OpenStack fits the bill.

1. Low Cost:
   Well suited for low cost cloud deployments. SMBs do not have legacy infrastructure which needs to be modernised. It is much easier to setup a fresh new OpenStack cloud that is completely open source.
2. Cloud in a box :
   Though cloud in a box might not suit for Enterprise market, it can help SMBs to standup an OpenStack cloud with minimal configuration. There are OpenStack vendors like Mirantis, Piston Cloud, OpenStack DevStack who already offer these OpenStack in a box solution.
3. Professional services :
   There are a plethora of Professional service providers like Bluemeric who can bridge the gap between the cloud service providers and the SaaS providers, enable cloud infrastructures & applications and automate application provisioning.
4. OSS:
   With Open Container Initiative, Open Cloud Native computing, OpenFlow, etc OpenStack is already in the OSS league. Enterprises are talking a serious look at the OSS , to avoid vendor lock-ins. OpenStack is the only Open Cloud platform that stands out as of today.
5. InterOperability :
   OpenStack APIs are interoperable with AWS, Eucalyptus & CloudStack. However there are still gaps around orchestrating the workloads across these interoperable clouds based on SLAs.
6. Cloud Native Applications at Scale :
   Google runs 2 billion containers a week. Google’s contribution to Openstack foundation and the initiatives like Murano, Magnum are driven towards interoperability across public & private clouds and managing containers at enterprise scale. However these are very early state initiatives which need to mature before they get production ready.

These are just my perspectives. Would wait until the official recorded session is published :-) Good Day !