OpenStack: Central to the transition from the Era of the Appliance to the Era of the Cloud

OpenStack is a general-purpose infrastructure that is now used everywhere to provide the on-demand availability of virtual machines, virtual networks and virtual disks. OpenStack's strength is that it provides the underlying substrate upon which CSPs can place software - and having a consistent OpenStack in every location allows them to roll-out new software and services at speed. Because an OpenStack is so strong it has very quickly become the consensus underlying infrastructure for CSPs and is used across the world for larger clouds and data centres. Mark Shuttleworth points out that the industry is now in a transitional phase as it moves on from the era of the appliance and into the era of the cloud. Sandwiched in the middle as the transition progresses are appliances and equipment where, in essence, the disk has been removed and sent off to the cloud as a virtual machine.​

Filmed at: OpenStack Summit, Boston, 2017