me when my editor at The Stack asked me to look at how OpenStack is getting along and whether people are using it to replace VMware now that Broadcom is firing all its partners and any customers who don't want to pay for its entire private cloud offering www.thestack.technology/can-openstac...

OpenStack came out of grid computing and shared storage and I'll be honest, I hadn't looked at whether it had kept up with cloud native and containers because I still thought of it as something for giant telcos with very large IT staffs www.thestack.technology/can-openstac...

But the Open Infrastructure Foundation joining the Linux Foundation was a hint that actually, OpenStack has moved on to support containers and Kubernetes, which means KubeVirt and virtualisation too, as well as VMware: pick and choose what you need, says Goutham Pacha Ravi - kind of like with VMware

I talked to @cloudnull.bsky.social who came back to Rackspace when they came back to OpenStack to understand why now is such an interesting time for OpenStack, who it's for and what it takes to make it work well (hint: being good at Linux is a big part of it, you'll need SREs)

So is OpenStack just for the big banks and the giant telcos? Opinions differ here; Sean Cohen at Red Hat thinks that's where it shines but Ravi and @cloudnull.bsky.social had a lot of stories about trying it out at smaller scale, so I'll keep an eye on where it starts showing up.

Since writing this piece I have been finding people (not in smaller organizations but maybe with smaller teams than you'd think), running OpenStack and OpenShift for the mix of VMs and containers because Broadcom has just made VMware uneconomic. Lots of folks will need to move this next year too...