At OpenStack Summit in Boston last May, some speculated that the event might be the last gasp for the open-source platform for cloud computing and infrastructure as a service. Granted, OpenStack was one of the less hyped open-source projects of the past year. But renewed community and end-user interest is breathing fresh life into the platform, according to Rob Young (pictured), senior manager of virtualization product and strategy at Red Hat Inc.

Telcos and others are adopting OpenStack “because of the simplification of what was once complex, but also in the cost savings that can be realized by managing your own cloud within a hybrid cloud environment,” Young said.

Red Hat has kept a hand in OpenStack through its ups and downs and is now on its eleventh version of Red Hat OpenStack Platform. “We continue to lead that market as far as OpenStack development, innovation and contributions,” Young said.

Young spoke with host Lisa Martin (@LisaDaliMartin) and guest host John Troyer (@jtroyer) of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio during the recent VMworld conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. (* Disclosure below.)

Breaking open OpenStack

OpenStack’s reputation as unwieldy is due to some of the initial scale requirements — particularly the number of servers needed, according to Young. Red Hat has focused on breaking OpenStack into more manageable pieces.

“We looked at the components, and we have unshackled them from each other,” Young said.

Now users can scale storage, network and availability individually on whatever number of servers they choose, he explained. “If you want to have a very large footprint with many nodes of storage, we can do that; if you want to scale that just when peak season hits, you can do that as well,” he stated.

Red Hat has also created separate open-source communities just for individual OpenStack components. “We’ve also led the effort to create open APIs [Application Program Interfaces] for management tools,” Young added.

Open source’s rapid innovation cycle has made OpenStack much more user-friendly than it was a few years ago. In addition to telecommunications companies, financial, healthcare and public sector institutions are increasingly adopting OpenStack, Young concluded.

Watch the complete video interview here, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for VMworld 2017. Neither VMware Inc. nor Red Hat Inc. have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE