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Market Overview of OpenStack Distributions

Transformation

Article from ADMIN 94/2026

By Martin Loschwitz

OpenStack is an excellent choice for building private clouds for infrastructure as a service. This market overview discusses the strengths of various OpenStack IaaS distributions.

When OpenStack [1] started to gain momentum about 15 years ago, the project was considered one of the best responses to the growing dominance of proprietary cloud providers. In the year 2012, many data centers experienced a palpable sense of optimism. OpenStack promised to deliver what admins had been missing until then: an open vendor-neutral platform that could be used to build infrastructure as a service (IaaS) in their data centers comparable to Amazon Web Services offerings, but under their control.

The project and its product has retreated, at least in part, from that vision for numerous reasons (see the "Primordial OpenStack" box) and has established itself in a role that allows it to play to its strengths as a robust infrastructure platform for specific use cases, such as in telecommunications networks, for service providers, or in sovereign cloud environments.

Primordial OpenStack

Originally, the appeal of OpenStack lay less in individual technical components than in the vision of an open cloud operating system. The idea was to standardize the provision of compute, storage, and networking with automation, multitenanting, and APIs. For many organizations, this sounded like the long-awaited escape from vendor lock-in in the cloud or with VMware and a move away from rigid virtualization platforms. Hyperscalers and telecommunications providers became involved in the project at an early stage, hardware manufacturers saw new sales opportunities, and the community grew rapidly.

During this phase, OpenStack was dubbed the "Linux of the cloud." The project attracted developers, operators, and service providers alike. OpenStack Summits soon grew into massive events filling entire exhibition venues. OpenStack-related roadmaps were very ambitious, and hardly a major data center

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