Madhu Kasyap, Brocade, at OpenStackSV 2014 with John Furrier and Jeff Frick @theCUBE #theCUBE #OpenStack #Brocade #SiliconANGLE #OpenstackSV our years after launch, OpenStack is finally starting to see the first user communities forming, according to the head of the industry consortium that oversees the development of the fast-emerging cloud framework. In his latest appearance on theCUBE during a recent community gathering at the Computer History Museum, OpenStack Foundation executive director hailed the trend as an important turning point in the evolution of the project. In the early days of the initiative, he reflected, the ecosystem consisted mostly of developers caught in the allure of a fledgling open-source platform with the lofty goal of disrupting the enterprise status quo. Once it became clear that OpenStack holds the very real potential to realize its objective, vendors started to join the fray en masse with products and services that placed the project on the accelerating growth project it’s racing along today. And now, those offerings are attracting paying customers who Bryce said are emerging as a source of invaluable input for the broader community filling the missing piece in the open-source development puzzle. “It’s the piece that is extremely critical to keep us focused in the right direction,” he said. “There is nothing like a user to say the obvious thing and tell you what you’re doing wrong and what you’re doing great.” Growth pains The staggering increase in the adoption of OpenStack is adding a lot of momentum to the project, but it’s also creating practical problems that are already beginning to weigh down on Bryce’s foundation. Most pressing of them all is the need to manage the growing amount of code submitted from the ecosystem, which he told theCUBE hosts John Furrier and Jeff Frick is outpacing the capacity of the systems put in place to handle the task. And that’s just one aspect of the broader challenge the OpenStack Foundation: rallying a highly fragmented community numbering more than 3,000 contributors scattered across over 100 countries. Read more after the video: . . Big or small, are all welcome The ecosystem, in its present state, is an assorted mix of independent developers with an affinity for open-source software and vendors hoping for an early start on the next big thing in enterprise computing. Some believe that the widening involvement of the latter crowd may stifle the evolution of OpenStack, but Bryce is of the opinion opposite is true. The way he sees it, the more players in the ring, the better. “What we’re talking about is changing the way all IT is done: how every server, every storage device, every networking device and every data center is managed. That’s a huge opportunity and there’s not gonna be one approach that works,” Bryce explained, highlighting the need for a variety of solutions to address the different requirements of the fast-growing OpenStack user base.