One of my goals attending the OpenStack Design Summit in Santa Clara this week was to figure out just what exactly OpenStack is and what it wants to become.

Listening to so many talks and discussions, I now understand it: OpenStack is the house elves of your data center, and a set of magic incantations that make them do your bidding.

Recall, from Harry Potter, the role of house elves: they work on behalf of a master to do chores such as housework, often in the background, using their own brand of not entirely understood magic, like apparition.

The result: the right dinner shows up instantaneously on the Hogwarts dining room tables. Nobody knows exactly how it happened, but dinner was asked for and it got delivered, and so it doesn’t really matter how it got accomplished. Only if one looks into the subterranean kitchen, where the house elves do their work, does it become apparent just how complex the activities are they do on a routine basis.

So, OpenStack are the house elves of your data center; actually of your virtual datacenter, because it doesn’t deal in real things but in virtual things.

In the real world, you have things such as servers, disk drives, bridges, routers, and cables. People schlep them about, and connect them to each other. If you want any changes, a person has to pick up the box, or replace the disk, or plug in a wire.

In the OpenStack world, we have the same, except that everything is virtual: virtual servers, virtual storage, virtual networking etc. Because of that, people aren’t required, but virtual house elves who make them appear by magic or move them about. They get their commands through special incantations called an API. And they can do some magic: like make servers appear and disappear, connected as many wires between pieces as you like without having to dig up the floor. They are also much faster than people, listen instantly to your incantations, and don’t demand union wages ;-)

But the result is the same as in Harry Potter: dinner shows up when you want to, it has all the dishes cooked right and arranged nicely on your plate and nobody needs to know how it happened.

This also makes it clear what OpenStack is not: nutrition advice, or the kitchen. In other words, OpenStack is not PaaS, or best practices for application construction (but very much best practices for cooking, aka how the house elves assemble what ends up on your plate, such as storage or instances.)

I can’t wait for my own house elves!