At Cloud Connect 2013 in Chicago this week, sessions and keynotes addressed Amazon Web Services, Eucalyptus Systems, and Apache Cloudstack. Google App Engine was recognized as a leading platform-as-a-service. But attendees, voting with their feet, flocked to the sessions on OpenStack.
Speakers from newly publicized OpenStack implementers Gap, BrightTag and Argonne National Laboratory talked about their experiences with it. Surprisingly, one OpenStack cloud was initiated on a handful of used servers purchased “cheap” off eBay. Another implementer warned that moving to OpenStack is a good idea, but you won’t be able to find operations people with any experience with it.