Adoption of OpenStack in the enterprise has been progressing steadily over the last two years. As a Forrester Report* on enterprise adoption from September noted, “OpenStack demonstrates the completeness, robustness, and capability upon which a broader range of adopters can depend.” OpenStack deployments have proven to be complex in larger IT organizations though, but not because of the reasons that you might anticipate. Much has been made about the complexity of installing the software, but we’ve found that the lion’s share of effort in these implementation comes around the practice of integrating IaaS into the fabric of enterprise IT and evolving existing processes to meet the expectations of the user community.

The first area where we’ve seen complexity in adoption of OpenStack is around the deployment of the infrastructure software itself. While most large organizations have a strong competency in agile development practices at the application layer these days, very few of them have a similar competency at the infrastructure layer. Disciplines like incremental release planning, automated testing, and continuous delivery are often applied to the OpenStack deployment process with great success. These application development processes and tools need to be adapted to the requirements of the infrastructure team and integrated into their workflow. The benefits of this work are large – as infrastructure teams adopt version-controlled configuration management, automated deployments, and automated testing, the scale at which they can operate is dramatically increased.