I love the metaphor of farm animals and pets, and entirely get the concept and why farm animals are a much better way to build services.

It seems however, some people who believe “farm animal” servers are the only ones that matter, and that supporting the pets in Openstack is redundant and a waste of effort.

As someone who works in an enterprise IT department that would love to embrace Openstack, I really only have one thing to say:

“Enterprise IT departments don’t get to choose the core applications that their business runs on.”

If Openstack is “farm animals only”, then you can guarantee that many (most?) IT departments will go elsewhere for their cloud infrastructure management, and when VMware and Microsoft finish collecting those invoice payments, there’ll be a lot less money coming into Openstack to pay for future developments.

I hope Openstack is pet friendly very soon, not because I love having them around, but because the transition to cloud from large, monolithic, scale-up applications is already hard enough, and having a unified infrastructure management would make it that bit easier for us all.