Getting into openstack, this should be a good read

What is that you need to get right?

• A team, this is the most important aspect. It’s an upright investment that you have to make. The choice is yours, you either invest on a team or on a tool like VMware VRA or HP CSA or System Center or CMP of your choice
• Choose the right set of application and use cases
• Update cycle and tests related to releases
• Choose the business model
• Make doubly sure before you choose to update, have a comprehensive test and update methodology in place.
• OpenStack has new multiple business models. (I recently meet Platform9 team in VMworld 2015 and in summary I think the business model  is innovative)

What is that you need to be watchful about?

• Very large companies has dedicated engineering budgets the are investing in OpenStack
• OpenStack is still seen as a set of tools and not a suite, I think VMware took the right steps at that right time and got VRA in place (mostly) and getting NSX was one the brightest move.
• Compute and Storage is a lot mature
• The complete ecosystem might not exist in OpenStack right away (be it NSX/ACI) but it’s a matter of time cisco and brocade are getting into it now. VMware has VIVO integrated with Neutron. There is an HOL for it as well.
• I am sure that some of the customers might invest more in containers. There are many reasons for it, OpenStack is complex has stability issues and scalability is a challenge. Common complaint is that the network just breaks.
• One of the most important reasons could be that containers are solving the developer’s problems and the developer attention has moved to containers.

Note: I wanted to share my perspective on OpenStack. If you disagree please drop in a note @

http://www.knowaboutcloud.com/what-do-you-need-to-get-openstack-in-your-environment/