OpenStack has quickly become an important factor in the cloud infrastructure business. Started in 2010 as a small open source project, the solution is used by over a hundred companies and organizations around the world. Among others big enterprises (PayPal, Wells Fargo, Deutsche Telekom) as well as innovative cloud startups and developer. In the early years OpenStack was used by its initiators to build own proprietary cloud environments. More than 850 companies support the project, including IBM, Oracle, Red Hat, Cisco, Dell, Canonical, HP and Ericsson.
Although OpenStack is an open source solution, this does not imply, that the setup, operations and maintenance is easy to handle. OpenStack can act like a real beast. A number of CIOs, who operate own developed OpenStack infrastructures, are reporting of a significant rise of costs and complexity. To customize OpenStack for their individual requirements they made several delicate adjustments. As a result, they have developed OpenStack implementations which are no longer compatible with the current releases. This leads to the question if a “build” or “buy” strategy is the right approach to deploy OpenStack in the corporate IT environment.
My Crisp Research colleague Dr. Carlo Velten and I had a critical look on this topic and answer the key questions for CIOs and IT decision makers in our Analyst Report „Der CIO im OpenStack Dilemma: BUY oder DIY?“.
The Analyst Report „Der CIO im OpenStack Dilemma: BUY oder DIY?“ can be downloaded under http://www.crisp-research.com/report-der-cio-im-openstack-dilemma-buy-oder-diy/.
