OpenStack: Do The Needs of the Many Outweigh the Needs of the Few? [VIDEO]

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Here’s a question for the OpenStack cloud platform: is it software built for a select few or is it built to meet the needs of everyone?

In a video interview, Jonathan Bryce, executive director, and Mark Collier, Chief Operating Officer of the OpenStack Foundation, discuss how OpenStack is evolving to meet multiple layers of needs.

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One of the most famous Science Fiction movie lines of all time is particularly adept at helping to describe how OpenStack can meet user needs. In Star Trek II The Wrath of Khan, Spock says, “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” Whether the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few in OpenStack is a question that Mark Collier articulately answered.

“Collectively people are all pursuing their own enlightened self-interest that does lift up the many,” Collier said. “Capitalism and open source are far from being a dichotomy, they actually work really well together.”

In a more technical sense, there has been some discussion over the years about what OpenStack is all about and whether it can or should cater to all needs. There is now an evolving concept within the OpenStack community of thinking of OpenStack as a layered ecosystem of services and capabilities. The first layer is the most fundamental functionality and then there are more specific layers built on top of that. It’s a similar concept to the way that networking and the Linux operating system is built.

Bryce noted that there is often a debate within the OpenStack community about how often new releases should come out. Currently new releases debut every six months, with new capabilities across the OpenStack projects. Overall, both Bryce and Collier expect OpenStack to continue to evolve in the months and years ahead.

“There is still a lot to do and I think that’s what keeps the job interesting,” Bryce said.

Watch the full video interview below:

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Datamation and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.