Cloud computing is about providing various types of infrastructural services, such as Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). The challenge, which has been set by the public cloud is about agility, speed, and self-service. Most companies have expensive IT systems, which they have developed and deployed over the years, but they are siloed and need human intervention. In many cases, IT systems are struggling to respond to the agility and speed of the public cloud services. The traditional data center model and siloed infrastructure might become unsustainable in today's agile service delivery environment. In fact, today's enterprise data center must focus on speed, flexibility, and automation for delivering services to get to the level of next-generation data center efficiency.
The big move to a software infrastructure has allowed administrators and operators to deliver a fully automated infrastructure within a minute. The next-generation data center reduces the infrastructure to a single, big, agile, scalable, and automated unit. The end result is a programmable, scalable, and multi-tenant-aware infrastructure. This is where OpenStack comes into the picture: it promises the features of a next-generation data center operating system. The ubiquitous influence of OpenStack was felt by many big global cloud enterprises such as VMware, Cisco, Juniper, IBM, Red Hat, Rackspace, PayPal, and eBay, to name but a few. Today, many of them are running a very large scalable private cloud based on OpenStack in their production environment. If you intend to be a part of a winning, innovative cloud enterprise, you should jump to the next-generation data center and gain valuable experience by adopting OpenStack in your IT infrastructure.