If you’ve read my recent blog post recapping the Austin OpenStack Summit, you’ll know I believe OpenStack is beginning to cross the chasm from early to mainstream adoption.

I’m not alone in that assessment; folks inside and outside the OpenStack ecosystem have noted the same trend. Despite this encouraging trend, however, there are warning signs to consider — the most serious being that the overwhelming majority of private cloud deployment, including those using OpenStack, seem to end in failure.

What are the reasons for this? While OpenStack is indeed a complex platform that can be inherently difficult to deploy and to manage, many in the community have also noted that the causes for failure is not primarily the technology. Check out this chart from analyst firm Gartner, which parses the reasons for failure:

To read more about why I think OpenStack as a Service is the best consumption model, please click here to go to my article on the Rackspace blog site.