| | December 20169CIOReviewWhen looking at appropriate uses, OpenStack has proven to be well-suited for building a private "as-a-Service" shared environment for your internal teams to collaborate on. This has been particularly useful for consolidating Build or Test environments, such as enabling "CIas-a-Service" inside your organization, or "Deployment-as-a-Service" type offering (which allows your QA teams to easily deploy any release candidate to any test environment and start testing.) Engineering teams appreciate the speed, easy access and consistency that come with these self-service solutions. The ability to elastically scale up/down helps organizations reduces management overhead, improve resource utilization, and save on OPEX and CAPEX. In this scenario, it's easy to have your end to end orchestration platform manage these internal cloud resources, and allow teams to trigger deployments or test suites to the appropriate environments--which are span up and torn down depending on demand. New software development innovations, including Microservices approaches and container technologies, allow for extensible application architecture, and a vendor agnostic, scalable infrastructure. While Microservices simplify application deployments through a de-coupled approach to introducing new, high value functionality, they come with a price--because it is so fragmented, it is more difficult to track and manage all the independent, yet inter-connected, components of the application. To leverage the benefits of new innovations like Microservices with a combination of Docker, OpenStack and an end-to-end orchestration layer can help manage the challenges of the Microservices architecture, while supporting easy deployments across build, QA and production environments. This is one example of creating a scalable, centrally managed OpenStack infrastructure that helps both developers and IT operations team members.As the software delivery industry is always looking to increase technology efficiency and reduce costs the promise of a free, open source, cloud computing platform appearsto be an exciting alternative to other proprietary offerings. Yet, despite OpenStack's growing popularity, recent data shows that only 10 percent of large enterprises have deployed to the cloud, and those that do usually go with a public cloud option to start. But why?Challenges of OpenStack in the EnterpriseIn the case of OpenStack (as with the adoption of other open source technologies), `free' isn't entirely free. The OpenStack code base and supporting services may not be sufficiently mature for a "plug-n-play experience" and support for existing enterprise IT needs. So where does it leave enterprises looking to leverage OpenStack now? Due to the fact that the OpenStack installation is not trivial and legacy apps--prevalent in large organizations­might not fit into the cloud out of the box, many organizations are finding out that they currently have difficulty in either: · Standardizing on OpenStack, particularly for their production environments and/or· Maintaining and scaling OpenStack adoption throughout their organization for their internal infrastructure (such as their development machines, build environments, testing infrastructure, as well as deployment targets). In these instances above, it may become evident that OpenStack is neither a cheaper replacement to other proprietary offerings, nor a quick fix to all the current cloud deployment needs. So what is it good for? In the complex world of enterprise apps, no one stack/technology can be the answer to all of your needs. Different needs require different solutions. Large enterprises, particularly as they increasingly need to balance and integrate legacy systems with new web/cloud services or modern Microservices architectures--find that each application or component in their services catalog might require a different "best of breed" technology for optimal performance and maintainability. The trend seems to indicate that, eventually, OpenStack will become just one piece in your organization's federated/hybrid infrastructure. This emerging need and the opportunity to tailor your stack/ technology to best fit the specific needs of your particular use case means that organizations will need to learn how to deploy and manage OpenStack as part of a complex matrix involving a myriad of other technologies in their infrastructure. OpenStack has proven to be well-suited for building a private "as-a-Service" shared environment for your internal teams to collaborate onSteve Brodie
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