These views are my own.  Based on 1×1 discussions I’ve had in the OpenStack community, I am not alone.

If you’ve read my blog then you know I am a vocal and active supporter of OpenStack who is seeking re-election to the OpenStack Board.  I’m personally and professionally committed to the project’s success. And, I’m confident that OpenStack’s collaborative community approach is out innovating other clouds.

A vibrant project requires that we reflect honestly: we have an equal measure of challenges: shadow free fall Dev, API vs implementation, forking risk and others.  As someone helping users deploy OpenStack today, I find my self straddling between a solid release (Essex) and a innovative one (Grizzly). Frankly, I’m finding it very difficult to focus on Folsom.

Grizzly excites me and clearly I’m not alone.  Based on pace of development, I believe we saw a significant developer migration during feature freeze free fall.

In Grizzly, both Cinder and Quantum will have progressed to a point where they are ready for mainstream consumption. That means that OpenStack will have achieved the cloud API trifecta of compute-store-network.

• Cinder will get beyond the “replace Nova Volume” feature set and expands the list of connectors.
• Quantum will get to parity with Nova Network, addresses overlapping VM IPs and goes beyond L2 with L3 feature enablement like  load balancing aaS.
• We are having a real dialog about upgrades while the code is still in progress
• And new projects like Celio and Heat are poised to address real use problems in billing and application formation.

Everything I hear about Folsom deployment is positive with stable code and significant improvements; however, we’re too late to really influence operability at the code level because the Folsom release is done.  This is not a new dilemma.  As operators, we seem to be forever chasing the tail of the release.

The perpetual cycle of implementing deployment after release is futile, exhausting and demoralizing because we finish just in time for the spotlight to shift to the next release.

I don’t want to slow the pace of releases.  In Agile/Lean, we believe that if something is hard then we do should it more.  Instead, I am looking at Grizzly and seeing an opportunity to break the cycle.  I am looking at Folsom and thinking that most people will be OK with Essex for a little longer.

Maybe I’m a dreamer, but if we can close the deployment time gap then we accelerate adoption, innovation and happy hour.  If that means jilting Folsom at the release altar to elope with Grizzly then I can live with that.