Taking advantage of Piston Cloud’s latest product launch, I grabbed some time with co-founder Josh McKenty to talk about the OpenStack ecosystem and the industry more broadly. McKenty is an interesting guy – part of the original initiative that morphed into OpenStack, he’s also right in the middle of a few different shifts in the industry – he’s a member of both the OpenStack board and the Cloud Foundry community advisory group. He’s also part of the OpenStack interoperability committee and hence has some interest in the entire standards debate. I spoke with McKenty only a day or two before revelations about the on-again, off-again Piston sponsorship of the RedHat summit went public- it certainly was an interesting week for all involved. Anyway, I hit McKenty with a few questions, his answers are interesting….
Well, I guess beating out Red Hat for a customer account can get you “uninvited” from the Red Hat Summit…for awhile. Piston is one of the OpenStack private cloud players that puts it all together using their own secret sauce. Piston is compliant at the OpenStack core but then you do need a lot of other work done to turn OpenStack into a service platform that you can just run without having to do all the work that Piston does. I think Mr. Kepes is right to assert that not every OpenStack provider will achieve commercial success in the market, but Piston looks like it could.