Common OpenStack use cases

In spite of immense interest, huge investment, and public success, we've seen a number of cases where well-intentioned OpenStack projects fail or are at least perceived as a failure by the people who have funded them. When OpenStack projects fail, the technology itself is rarely the root cause. Thomas Bittman at Gartner noticed this trend and wrote an influential blog post entitled Why are Private Clouds Failing? in September 2014.

Bittman's findings echo many of our experiences from the field. In short, the reason that most private cloud projects fail is that improper expectations were set from the beginning, and the business goals for the cloud weren't realized by the end result.

First and foremost, OpenStack deployments should be seen as an investment with returns and not a project to reduce operational costs. Although we've certainly seen dramatic reductions in operational workloads through the automation that OpenStack provides, it is difficult to accurately quantify those reductions in order to justify the operational investment required to run an efficient cloud platform. Organizations that are entirely focused on cutting costs through automation should first look at automating existing virtual environments instead of deploying new environments.

We've also seen a lot of projects that had poorly quantified goals. OpenStack is an enabler of use cases and not an IT panacea. If the use cases are not agreed upon before investment in the platform begins, it will prove very difficult to justify the investment in the end. This is why the role of the Architect is so critical in OpenStack deployments—it is their job to ensure that concrete requirements are written upfront so that all of the stakeholders can quantify the success of the platform once deployed.

With this in mind, let's take a look at some typical use cases for OpenStack deployments.