The Evolution of OpenStack: From Hype to a Stable Private‑Cloud Infrastructure

In the past two years, the story between OpenStack and Kubernetes seems endless; both are leading players in the cloud‑computing era, and their development paths provoke deep reflection, with the IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS layers increasingly intertwined.

Just a few years ago, OpenStack was the hottest open‑source project, boasting a thriving startup ecosystem. By trying to push many individual projects simultaneously and taking longer than expected for enterprises to adopt it, the initiative ran into trouble, leaving many startups either stuck in the mud or acquired. Consequently, the nonprofit foundation that manages OpenStack began scaling back its broad‑tent model and refocused on core services.

OpenStack’s industry peak was around the end of 2014, when even small startups threw lavish parties funded by abundant venture capital. By 2016, major supporters such as Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cisco, and IBM began selling or reducing their involvement, and several startups announced exits, sending OpenStack into a low‑point. Nevertheless, the project kept moving forward, fixing many issues and adapting to a world dominated by containers and edge computing.

Today it has become a de‑facto stable system for running private clouds. The hype has faded, but many real‑world use cases have emerged. A few years ago it was hard to find large enterprises running critical OpenStack deployments in production; now, vendors such as SUSE report earning more from OpenStack than during the hype period, and the foundation’s latest statistics show that OpenStack users now manage over ten million CPU cores.

“There is a clash between speculation and reality,” says Mark Collier, COO of the OpenStack Foundation. “In people’s minds we have passed the peak of the hype cycle, and paradoxically, as hype declines, actual adoption often rises.”

The foundation has begun redirecting community effort toward open‑infrastructure architecture problems, without tying those efforts directly to the OpenStack codebase—a move that started years ago and is now taking concrete form.

At this week’s OpenStack Summit in Berlin, the foundation announced that this will be the last event using the OpenStack name; future gatherings will be called the Open Source Infrastructure Architecture Summit. The foundation itself will retain its name, much like the Linux Foundation, which continues to manage many other foundations while keeping its own brand.

During a recent board meeting, the foundation formalized a process for adding “pilot projects” that receive at least 18 months of support, focusing on CI/CD, container infrastructure, edge computing, data centers, and artificial intelligence/machine learning. Four pilot projects have been announced: Airship, Kata Containers, StarlingX, and Zuul.

These projects are not brand‑new and are at various stages of development, but the foundation emphasizes that it will not try to manage dozens of projects or create new boards for each. Instead, it aims for a compact, focused scope that serves operators and infrastructure managers without adding bureaucracy.

The foundation’s members acknowledge that many details still need to be resolved and that it will take time.

Nevertheless, as a mature technology in actual use, OpenStack is not disappearing; it remains the core around which the foundation’s efforts revolve. “Open source infrastructure architecture started with OpenStack, so the two are inseparable,” says Collier. “The core OpenStack community is actively considering how to deploy OpenStack alongside other technologies, many of which now integrate more easily because they share the same scenarios.”

Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth expressed a slightly different view, worrying that spreading the foundation’s focus across multiple projects might divert attention from the core OpenStack effort. He hopes the expanded scope will not confuse users and that OpenStack will retain its long‑term stability.

Many companies have recently refocused on OpenStack. Mirantis, an early and well‑funded supporter, shifted toward application delivery a year ago but continues to build its business around OpenStack. As new customers such as Adobe and Apple expand their deployments, OpenStack business continues to grow, especially with the foundation’s emphasis on edge computing.

Interest in OpenStack is especially strong in China, while the U.S. market continues to grow more slowly. Collier attributes China’s success to massive infrastructure demand combined with a strong embrace of open source.

OpenStack’s resurgence also puts it in competition with the Linux Foundation’s CNCF, especially as Ceph—originally an open‑source storage service used by many OpenStack and container deployments—has formed its own foundation under the Linux Foundation.

Both Sell and Collier see this as a positive statement of collaboration rather than competition. They emphasize that the community, not the governing foundation, is what matters most to users.

Looking back, OpenStack’s journey has been fascinating. When the author first followed OpenStack, it was at the peak of its hype cycle, with many branches and a confusing project scope. Over time, enterprise adoption slowed, but companies like Mirantis secured enough funding to persist and eventually reap rewards. The community and large‑enterprise supporters have remained, driven by the growing number of private‑data‑center use cases across telecom, banking, and other sectors.

Today OpenStack may seem unexciting, with no major new features, but enterprises continue to rely on it because it provides a stable foundation rather than a flashy new technology. The foundation is reshaping itself to meet community needs, and the emergence of new pilot projects could spark another wave of interest.

OpenStack Technical Articles:

OpenStack Technology and Practice Details

Discussing the Eight‑Year Itch of OpenStack

OpenStack Keystone Authentication System Explained

OpenStack Magnum Container Engine Details

Comprehensive OpenStack Knowledge Overview

OpenStack Libvirt Basics

Insights from the OpenStack Pike Release

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