OpenStack India Day and APAC Momentum

Recently I had the privilege of presenting at OpenStack India Day in Bangalore. I was in great company, alongside speakers from SwiftStack, HP, the OpenStack Foundation and other key contributors to OpenStack. The conversations generated at the sold-out event covered a broad range of both technical and industry topics, but the overall takeaway was that India is very excited about open source in general, and OpenStack is no exception. In fact, a quick poll showed approximately 60 percent of the audience were already running on OpenStack, with a great many more looking to deploy in the next six months.

The opportunity to connect with Indian OpenStack users was made even more exciting by the growing enthusiasm for Ubuntu there – more than 95 percent of OpenStack users present were running on Ubuntu. As a result, I had the chance to talk in depth about Ubuntu’s newer features, including a great discussion on the ease of deploying Ceph distributed storage with Ubuntu Juju. By distilling service orchestration into manageable recipes, Juju Charms make it simpler and faster to configure OpenStack-supported systems like Ceph. The audience’s feedback showed that Juju is coming to be recognised as an important component of successful OpenStack deployments.

Two years ago, the first ever OpenStack meetup in India was held at Ubuntu Cloud Day in 2011; OpenStack India now already has more than 1,500 members, and interest in OpenStack India Day this year was double our seating capacity! It’s not just Canonical seeing the value of this growing community. Cisco, Dell, HP and other large industry players represented at the event all have staff in Bangalore, working to support and expand on this OpenStack momentum.

India is certainly a great place for Ubuntu and OpenStack to be. Last year alone, the Indian public cloud market grew 36 percent to more than $400m, according to Gartner. With cloud spending in emerging markets projected by IDC to experience a CAGR of 37.3 percent for the 2013-2017 period, a rate almost twice that of developed markets, there’s no doubt that we’ll continue to see clouds popping up all over India – many of them powered by OpenStack. As a flexible, cost efficient and highly interoperable cloud platform, OpenStack makes perfect sense for homegrown clouds and regional service providers.

And open cloud enthusiasm in APAC is certainly not limited to India. Next month, Hong Kong is hosting the OpenStack Summit, where keynote case studies will be presented by cloud innovators working in China, Japan and beyond. Our founder, Mark Shuttleworth, will help kick off the conference by igniting a discussion around advances in interoperability that are enabling organizations to achieve greater business value from their OpenStack clouds. It’s an event not to be missed if you’re able to make the journey!

We’re looking forward to our next trip to India, and I’m personally excited and pleased with the reception OpenStack, Ubuntu and our many partners are receiving there.