There is an open design and development process, and it works. It can and does support integrating new projects, the process for vetting new ideas, and growing a stronger portfolio of new services. The sunlight of transparency only makes the design and vetting process stronger. Continued innovation is critical. Expanding cloud competitor, Amazon, recognizes this, and the OpenStack community needs to embrace this ethos as well.
The difference between these two cloud giants is that everything OpenStack does, it does in the open. All of our successes and failures are in the open. So, we must beware to believe the OpenStack processes cannot support growth beyond the core IaaS feature set. If we do, we fail to grow OpenStack’s own portfolio of features, and we risk quickly becoming irrelevant as Amazon continues its proprietary quest for cloud market domination and saturation. In order to have a competitive open source offering for building clouds, both public and private—we need to add new services and features to the OpenStack portfolio to mature and stabilize the ‘core’ projects.