I was personally looking forward all week to Jim Curry – Senior Vice President & General Manager, Private Cloud & OpenStack Community, Rackspace stopping by #theCUBE to sit down with the guys at the #OpenStack Summit. In his interview with co-hosts John Furrier and Jeff Frick, he really dug into what OpenStack meant to Rackspace and the importance of the user community to OpenStack.

As Furrier has alluded to, the halo effect for Rackspace from OpenStack is never more palpable than at OpenStack Summit 2013. A conference that once had a budget of $15,000 and was a heavy-ask collection of 75 folks, in just a few short years now has a budget of $2,000,000 and a let-me-in collection of 3,000+. OpenStack is being run at a very, very large scale now. Curry informed the guys that they’ve have over 550 million API requests on Nova. With the community, Rackspace has built a scalable and thriving cloud offering with OpenStack.

There was a lot of marketing hype when OpenStack was first conceived, and we at SiliconANGLE were initially very tough on OpenStack feeling like it was too much of a “pool party.” So how did Curry and Rackspace avoid the marketing hype? “We started as a promise, we had object storage but not much else,” said Curry. They brought together a lot of people, and from day one said they’d never commercialize the product and package up and sell. From jump the group was building together. He recounted that first meeting at NASA, where they crafted a vision and architected the OpenStack you see today. When you keep people distracted with work that needs to get done, well, work just gets done.

So what is the future of OpenStack? Enterprise and Service Providers (SPs) want unique plug-and-play choices, says Curry. Rackspace announced this week it will provide telcos and other service providers with OpenStack technology that will enable them to compete better with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Rackspace to SPs and Telcos: create private clouds, we’ll run it for you! While that is a very interesting play, there is a proof that there is an evolution happening in the market and somewhere between private and public cloud is where the bulk of the market is going to end up. One model doesn’t fit all, or anyone really. The hybrid model of private, public and managed cloud is what the market is going to shake out to eventually.

Curry says infrastructure as code is a concept. Rackspace’s committed code continues to go down while its usage continues to go up. This speaks to the progression of OpenStack. When asked to reflect on his experience with OpenStack here is his parting shot:

I’ve learned, personally, big bets are important to make as a company…In the big scheme of things, it was obvious to do as you look back at it. We’ve never been unwilling to pivot…Created a culture of collaboration…Because we put develoeprs first, because we’ve made it Americopacy, it’s worked.