Gartner has predicted that by 2020, a corporate “no public-cloud” policy will be as rare (or as ridiculous) as a corporate “no-internet” policy would be today. Hybrid cloud will be the most common implementation among enterprises.

Multi-cloud has become the new standard and a lot of organizations see it as a necessary evil. Organizations cannot avoid investing in a cloud and still expect to remain competitive. However, it is extremely complex to deploy and manage a multi-cloud across diverse endpoints, while trying to use a single set of IT policies across them. In addition, developers want to get frictionless access to any cloud endpoint they choose.

OpenStack was founded with the intention to break free from the vendor lock-in that proprietary technology stacks such as VMware imposed, by bringing together diverse virtualization technologies under a single, open standard.

A similar vendor lock-in is becoming a reality when enterprises make heavy use of a public cloud. If an organization does not implement their cloud strategy well, they may be doomed by massive operational costs owed to AWS (or their favorite public cloud vendor), due to lock-in.

The sentiment to standardize platforms and avoid lock-in is shared across the OpenStack community. As you can see in this chart from the OpenStack User Survey April 2016, 97% of respondents listed “Standardize on the same open platform and APIs that power a global network of public and private clouds” among their top priorities.

The question we ask in this context is, why should the standardization and cost-reduction benefits of OpenStack, the most popular open source standard for IaaS, be restricted to private cloud only? There’s a huge benefit to be had by transforming OpenStack into a true hybrid cloud layer, where the OpenStack API becomes an open standard to include not just private cloud, but public cloud management as well.

The benefits of this model should be obvious:

IT leaders benefit from a single open standard to deploy and govern against, with the gravy on top being they can now leverage unified multi-tenancy to execute quota management, single sign-on (SSO) and other IT policies across public cloud as well.

For developers, this means one API to rule them all.

In case you missed the live announcement at OpenStack Barcelona, here are Jonathan Bryce, Executive Director of the OpenStack Foundation and Madhura Maskasky, VP product at Platform9, introducing OpenStack Omni



Announcing OpenStack Drivers For AWS

Today, we announced the first-of-its-kind set of OpenStack drivers to control and manage resources on AWS. The drivers provide the ability to integrate core OpenStack projects such as Nova, Glance, Neutron, and Cinder with AWS and provide a seamless experience managing an AWS endpoint using OpenStack. Our goal is for this to become a community-driven initiative to help contribute support for other popular public clouds in the future.

The project is available as an open-source project on github. The related launchpad blueprints can be found at these links for Neutron, Glance, Nova and Cinder. Our goal is to contribute this to OpenStack and include these drivers among the core OpenStack drivers that ship out-of-the-box.

Here’s a a demo of this functionality in action.

Please provide your feedback below and let us know if you’d like to help contribute to the project and extend it further.