You've had your "Aha moment." You get the OpenStack value proposition. You've listened to other customers talk about their success with it. You can see the problems it's going to solve for your organization. You are all in.
But it's not enough. Just know that. Even if you're the decider-in-chief, and you can make the call to start an OpenStack initiative at your company tomorrow, you've got another, bigger job on your hands, and that's changing your company culture.
So say the panelists that were speaking at a Cisco-sponsored session yesterday about their experiences with OpenStack. They agreed unanimously that the technology isnotthe challenge when deploying an OpenStack-based private cloud. It's changing the company culture. Giving developers more freedom and trusting them to do great things (which a proper cloud will in fact enable them to do), vs. controlling them tightly in a traditional IT environment. It's embracing the "Fail fast, fail small, fail often," model that allows for quick learning and innovation.
One panelist said, "The technology is there. It works. It's easy to use. But changing how people use it is the hard part." Another pointed out that it's even harder if you're in an established (non-startup) company with yearly CapEx cycles and capacity planning. "It's difficult to get groups to buy in on an OpEx model and move away from their established processes," he said, with a look that suggested he's been down that road. A third mentioned "dragging them kicking and screaming" as part of his strategy to get his company there.
All agreed that moving to the cloud is the right thing to do. Just that the big surprise was that the technology was the least of the challenges when doing it.
Some of them are HP's cats. Some are Intel's. And still others belong to Swiftstack or Red Hat. The point is that they all have homes. They are not strays with nothing else to do. They have obligations to those that feed them. So if you're going to borrow those cats for the OpenStack project you're leading, you need to respect that. It will make for happier, more loyal, more productive cats.
Other tips that John Dickinson passed on in his talk about how to get things done as an OpenStack PTL:
The community is opening up to the idea of using other programming languages. I heard it more than once-on panels-from people whose opinions matter. The only questions seem to be how and where to get started, and how to mitigate some of the complications that will result from this shift.