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Huawei to OpenStackers: Don't try to chase Amazon, Microsoft and Google

Strike out on your own instead of playing catch-up

OpenStack Summit First came AWS, then Microsoft’s Azure – now Google’s Cloud Platform (GCP). Microsoft’s been playing feature catch-up to AWS since 2008 with the baton passing now to Google under Diane Greene.

OpenStackers, though, be warned: do NOT join this race and try to catch public cloud market number-one AWS.

So says Anna Lai, vice president of global business development for networking and telecoms equipment giant Huawei.

Lai encouraged OpenStackers on Tuesday to "think outside the box" and do something nobody else – ie AWS, Azure and GCP – has done.

"That's the only way we can push the boundaries and make OpenStack unique," she told the OpenStacker Conference in Barcelona.

A relatively late arrival to OpenStack, Huawei is the third-largest code committer after Mirantis and Red Hat. It has more than 225 cloud data centres and is committed to running OpenStack.

Speaking to The Reg shortly afterwards, Lai pressed home her message.

Public cloud providers are following their own agendas, she warned, driven by commercial motives, while OpenStack – because it's open source – can meet customers' real-world needs.

All IT vendors claim they develop features and roadmaps in response to "customer feedback" but especially so in cloud.

Amazon reckons to have released 634 new features and services for AWS at last count 2016. Press Amazon. The parrot response is it’s – yup – responding to customers.

With the cloud providers having now rolled out infrastructure, the action's moved up the stack to data and analytics - AWS with Space Needle big data analytics tool jostling with Microsoft's Azure Data Lake Analytics. Google, meanwhile, was in London last week pitting BigQuery against AWS's Redshift.

Lai, however, pointed out that such firms are actually following their own corporate strategies and that what customers really want might be at odds with those strategies.

"Amazon and Google have their own strategy, but OpenStack is about being open and inclusive. We need to have our own mission to make OpenStack something that's for large scale," she told The Reg.

“We [OpenStack] shouldn't compare ourselves to the proprietary vendors because we'd be playing catch-up. Amazon and VMware are proprietary technologies that have company-specific direction that matters to their company strategy but OpenStack is an open community. We want to be free and open."

Lei reckoned OpenStack lets you better satisfy customers requirements because development is not filtered through the filter of corporate objectives and because the code is open to all.

That said, OpenStack projects are influenced by vendor politics and personalities – like many such open-source efforts.

"With proprietary, you are looking in and you have to rely on the vendor... but with OpenStack you can participate in the community. The user can shape the requirements.

“Amazon and Microsoft do open source on small portions of their technology to get the customer.”

Echoing Lei was RackSpace chief technology officer John Engates, also speaking to The Reg. What he called "the foundation" layer of public cloud is largely in place. RackSpace was a founder of OpenStack with Nasa.

"The question is do you try to match features as it goes further up the stack. I don't think that's wise. You really need to listen to your customers," Engates said.

Providers of public cloud are acting not just on their customers' feedback but those of their own internal business units and product managers, he noted.

Being open source means OpenStackers can build code to suite niche, non-profit and other interests that might otherwise go unanswered.

"I don't think anybody in the OpenStack community should be trying to copy the public cloud unless that's the business they are in," he said.

Speaking shortly after Lai, Jörn Kellermann of Telekom subsidiary T-Systems – a corporate sponsor of OpenSack that runs its Open Telekom Cloud on OpenStack – pressed the need for OpenStack to follow the needs of customers, customers like T-Systems rather than try to match AWS on a feature-for-feature basis.

"We will continue to invest [in OpenStack] to have a platform that's carrier grade in terms of quality, reliability and features and functions and we will continue to share that experience we've made in putting such large hyper-scale infrastructure back into the community, because we live in the community," he said.

"At the same time I'm asking you to continue to work on interoperability and avoid fragmentation – we don’t want any product that runs on one single instance of OpenStack and please continue going carrier-grade in terms of quality and function set. I believe we can take OpenStack to the next level." ®

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