OpenStack 2014 somehow reminds me a lot of OMG/CORBA 1993. It's interesting to watch the industry repeat itself.<p>Checklist:<p>- Anybody but "x" club, where X is the market leader. Openstack has vascillated between VMware and AWS here, CORBA had Microsoft.<p>- Large investments advertised as a penis swinging contest between HP, IBM, and others<p>- Chasing aging technology architecture as a panacea instead of building the next generation.<p>CORBA was chasing distributed objects, but the Web and REST was what really was going to matter. Today the big guys are chasing the IaaS model when we have a new generation of platform and application clouds (Mesos, YARN, CoreOS, Docker, CF, Asgard) growing out there.<p>The vendors will of course try to recoup their investment through reference architectures and "best practices" that tell customers they should have a multi-layer SaaS or PaaS running on an IaaS, even though lightweight alternatives like CoreOS will chug along doing nothing of the sort.<p>This is similar to how CORBA's IIOP was promoted to be the way to do "real work" with C++ or Enterprise JavaBeans in your middle tier, but this "Web" HTTP thing can be relegated to the front tier. I know fixed income systems around 1999 that literally wouldn't use HTTP for their blotter updates, with the lead devs insisting such events needed to be pushed over IIOP even though the front end was an IE control in a VBX. (this was shortly before TIBCO had effectively seized the market data industry)<p>- persistent flame wars about governance and architecture of said standard on the social media of the day<p>- Vendor adoption drastically outpacing customer adoption , developing a "buying customers" effect<p>This is not to say OpenStack is bad. There is value, potentially a lot of value, as there was with CORBA. That's all case-by-case. Just saying that vendor love fests rarely indicate a true revolution and most often are just an orchestrated marketing game by the current losers.