One of the insights I have from switching roles back to a enterprise IT customer is that I look at open source in a different light. In this TechTalk I discuss my challenges with OpenStack as a potential solution for future data center cloud management.
Virtualized Geek 
I looked at all the fixed and missing features that went into Kilo and I feel a lot better about OpenStack.
But OpenStack needs to be a time saver for building a private (or even public) cloud and there is only one way to get to that point, that is automating installation and upgrading. Because if private-cloud wants to compete with public-cloud it needs to be competitive. 😉
Obviously their are vendors, but they all have solutions which are not part of the original open source project which is less than ideal.
I had the hope that TripleO (OpenStack On OpenStack) project would pull through for Kilo so OpenStack would have an integrated installer/upgrade system, but it seems their solution was still to difficult to get it to a really good working stable state, so they are now moving it to containers (Kolla):
https://www.mirantis.com/blog/containers-rise-openstack-tripleo-slides/
It looks like Kolla has progressed further than TripleO got, so I’m gonna keep an eye on this presentation:
https://openstacksummitmay2015vancouver.sched.org/event/adcadb6b9d62995b11fa8acb2ef01b53#.VVjyKTY4bTY
Here is the list of OpenStack services which have a container-version now:
https://github.com/stackforge/kolla/tree/master/docker
And I want to watch this presentation about Magnum the OpenStack container service too:
https://openstacksummitmay2015vancouver.sched.org/event/ec3936678ef22681408088ec52a4e80b#.VVjxlDY4bTY
They say Magnum is multi-tenant CaaS (probably separate VM’s per tenant for now).
So I tried Kolla today. Had some smaller issues with it, spend a couple of hours fixing them and will probably submit the new code to the OpenStack project tomorrow.
Here are my findings of Kolla:
I’m able to install a VM with Fedora Desktop and install Kolla, set-up the VM (like open up the firewall), start kolla, login to a horizon and deploy a small test VM.
This only takes 30 minutes on my SSD and 10 GB of disk space of which half of the time is spend downloading.
Then you have a working OpenStack cloud running inside containers on a VM.
After that I can destroy the Kolla environment and set it up again and start a new test VM in only 5 minutes because there is nothing to install and setup the VM and nothing to download.
So in summary: it’s pretty darn great ! 🙂