Gartner has predicted that by 2020, a corporate “no public-cloud” policy will be as rare (or as ridiculous) as a corporate “no-internet” policy would be today. Hybrid cloud will be the most common implementation among enterprises.
Multi-cloud has become thenew standard and a lot of organizations see it as anecessary evil. Organizations cannot avoid investing in a cloud and still expect to remain competitive. However, it is extremely complex to deploy and manage a multi-cloud across diverse endpoints, while trying to use a single set of IT policies across them. In addition, developers want to get frictionless access to any cloud endpoint they choose.
OpenStack was founded with the intention to break free from the vendor lock-in that proprietary technology stacks such as VMware imposed, by bringing together diverse virtualization technologies under a single, open standard.
A similar vendor lock-in is becoming a reality when enterprises make heavy use of a public cloud. If an organization does not implement their cloud strategy well, they may be doomed by massive operational costs owed to AWS (or their favorite public cloud vendor), due to lock-in.
The sentiment to standardize platforms and avoid lock-in is shared across the OpenStack community. As you can see in this chart from theOpenStack User Survey April 2016, 97% of respondents listed “Standardizeon the same open platform and APIs that power aglobal networkof public and private clouds” among their top priorities.
