Until a few years ago, there were a couple of widely held beliefs in the open source cloud world. The first was that OpenStack, the project initially launched by
All that has kind of changed. OpenStack has undoubtedly matured, to the point where, at the OpenStack Summit being held in Vancouver this week (disclosure, the OpenStack Foundation is covering my travel and expenses to attend the event) the analysts present will be getting high-profile case studies about OpenStack in production. CloudStack has, sadly, fallen by the wayside somewhat. The high-profile and high-caliber executives that Citrix inherited from Cloud.com have moved on to greener pastures, and we don't hear much about CloudStack these days.
So in light of all of that, it is interesting to see some announcements coming out of Citrix HQ regarding its relationship with OpenStack. Alongside the OpenStack summit this week, Citrix is announcing that it is joining high-profile OpenStack vendor Mirantis' partner program. The program itself, being joined by a host of different vendors aims to ensure interoperability between various solutions. Fr Citrix, this means that NetScaler, its networking solution that is widely adopted among webscale operators, is certified to run on Mirantis. In addition, Citrix will work with Mirantis to integrate the deployment of XenServer, the company’s commercial virtualization platform based on the open-source Xen Project Hypervisor, through the OpenStack Fuel installer.
Beyond the importance of Citrix joining the program from a product perspective, what is really interesting here is the message it sends to the market. That Citrix, one of the big boys of technology, sees fit to issue a press release announcing its partnership with young upstart Mirantis talks to the fundamental changes occurring in the industry. It also casts a shadow over the CloudStack project.
When Citrix announced a couple of months ago that it was becoming a corporate sponsor of the OpenStack Foundation, eyebrows rose at the news. In a blog post explaining the news Citrix explained that Citrix has many irons in the fire and that CloudStack was only one of a broad range of things it was doing in the cloud. That statement in and of itself indicates the reducing importance that CloudStack plays in the Citrix portfolio and is, perhaps, an admission that OpenStack has won that particular battle.
Citrix tried to allay fears by saying that it wants to be an important part in ALL of the initiatives around cloud, and that OpenStack is just one of those. It opined that innovation is not a zero-sum game and hence broad support is important. Citrix reminded the world that it is still a leading contributor to the CloudStack project and has many engineers focusing on the project full-time. Not to mention its own commercial derivative product, Citrix CloudPlatform. In response to some questions from me, a Citrix spokesperson clarified further telling me that:
The move towards embracing OpenStack is not a move against
Apache CloudStack or our commercially available CloudPlatform product. The Apache CloudStack project remains a vibrant open-source project and Citrix continues to invest in CloudPlatform, which remains an important, supported product from Citrix with ongoing releases with new functionality and a large number of customer deployments. In the same way that Citrix supports multiple hypervisors under our XenDesktop product, we aim to support multiple cloud orchestration technologies with our infrastructure products.
It all sounds good, but I'm not completely convinced. While OpenStack certainly has some battles of its own to fight, it seems to me that the one it was fighting against CloudStack is pretty much over.
