OpenStack's Future Depends on Embracing Amazon. Now.
An Open Letter to the OpenStack Community: — Our Future Depends on Embracing Amazon — Dear Stackers, — For three years, elements of the OpenStack community have arbitrarily and unfairly positioned OpenStack against incumbents …
Context & Ripple Effects
CloudScaling's open letter lands at a moment when OpenStack's vendor coalition keeps widening — EMC followed VMware into the project in December 2012 — while its positioning stays fixed on fighting the incumbent rather than interoperating with it. The letter's core charge, confirmed in its own text: for three years, parts of the community have arbitrarily positioned OpenStack against Amazon instead of building toward it.
The timing gives the argument force. In the same window Amazon has filed to proceed with its roughly $600 million CIA cloud contract and reported quarterly earnings under intense scrutiny, evidence that the incumbent is consolidating exactly the enterprise and government accounts OpenStack targets. That eight outlets from TechCrunch to ZDNet picked up the letter within days suggests the community read it as a real provocation, not one vendor's blog post.
First-order effects
- OpenStack contributors and member companies face an immediate strategic fork: keep differentiating against AWS APIs or invest in compatibility with them — a debate now forced into the open by the letter.
- Vendors that joined the project recently, EMC among them, must reconcile their OpenStack roadmaps with a community direction that could pivot from opposition to coexistence with Amazon.
Second-order effects
- If compatibility becomes the community line, enterprise buyers weighing private OpenStack deployments against simply renting AWS gain a third option — hybrid architectures — pressuring both sides on pricing and lock-in terms.
- Hardware and software suppliers to the OpenStack ecosystem shift their product bets toward tooling that bridges the two platforms, since pure anti-AWS differentiation loses its marketing value.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, open-source infrastructure projects stop competing head-on with hyperscale incumbents and reposition as the interoperability and portability layer around them — an acknowledgment that API gravity favors whoever holds the workloads.
- A community that embraces the incumbent risks trading independence for relevance: the structural question of who sets cloud standards — an open foundation or Amazon's default interfaces — gets sharper either way.
The trend: Cloud infrastructure is consolidating around AWS's de facto standard, pushing open-source alternatives like OpenStack from head-on competition toward complementarity with the incumbent.