OpenStack's Growth Remains in Private Cloud

OpenStack seems to have found its niche in the cloud computing market. An ever-increasing number of major vendors and cloud providers are turning to OpenStack to build out their own offerings and provide cloud infrastructure for customers. But, according to one analyst, OpenStack has its limitations, and it will stay within the private cloud world.

Battery Ventures technical fellow Adrian Cockcroft’s analysis on OpenStack was recently reported on at GigaOM. And Cockcroft, a former cloud expert who was most recently working at Netflix before moving to Battery Ventures, noted that OpenStack is really catching on in the private cloud. For those who have joined the growing open source cloud movement, this is great, as Cockcroft noted that the brand will dominate in the private cloud world.

Forget about the public cloud, though. OpenStack is going to be a minor player, at best. As Cockcroft noted, Amazon Web Services (AWS) will continue to be reigning king of the public cloud, with others like Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOG) slowly catching up on the public cloud giant’s market share.

But in the private cloud realm, you’d better get used to people talking about open source and, in particular, OpenStack. With vendors including Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and IBM (IBM) jumping onto the OpenStack bandwagon, it’s clear there is an incredible, growing movement when it comes to OpenStack, but the real success for the platform is solely in private cloud. As Cockcroft noted, OpenStack lacks the scale for public cloud platforms.

Consider OpenStack’s bright and shiny future as we would have more than a decade ago when Linux really first started catching in within the vendor space. Linux has become critical to the IT world and a lot of IT infrastructure, including cloud. Now, take OpenStack, which is seeing a similar growth but strictly within the private cloud realm of infrastructure.