The year 2012 has been completely game-changing for the OpenStack open source cloud computing platform, which has numerous powerful companies backing it, many of which are part of the OpenStack Foundation. And, in the past week alone, Rackspace delivered its OpenStack-based private cloud solution along with rock solid support, and Red Hat announced that it is preparing an enterprise-class version of the OpenStack platform for hosting IaaS deployments. Now, there are criticisms arriving, as some analysts claim that OpenStack is in danger of becoming an overly fragmented cloud standard.
SearchCloudComputing reports the following quote from Lydia Leong, research vice president at Gartner Inc.:
“If your distro doesn’t have a lot of changes, then it doesn’t have a whole lot of differentiation. But if it does have changes, then you have fragmentation.”
Reportedly, Leong also suggests that supporting fragmented versions of OpenStack could become a challenge.
These concerns, of course, precisely echo the ones constantly raised in the Linux community about whether Linux is too fragmented for one, unified and strongly supported distribution to ever achieve much success.
