The open source cloud platform OpenStack has no enemies, and vendors and users are queueing to adopt it, the latest OpenStack Summit heard in Paris today. A lot of that support is still experimental, but OpenStack Foundation bosses had plenty to boast about.

With the new Juno release only out for a couple of weeks, around 4,600 OpenStack developers hit Paris for the community’s first Summit in Europe, and its biggest yet. Alongside the Summit, a separate track is working out the features for the next version Kilo, due in six months.

Running parallel to the event, OpenStack-focused service provider Mirantis launched its own distribution, and Linux leaders Red Hat and Canonical both showed new OpenStack abilities. Red Hat announced a Version 5 of its Cloud Infrastructure management package, and Canonical delivered its own home-grown OpenStack distribution - as well as discussing other projects including a hypervisor for containers.

Amazon - the monolith in the room
Praising OpenStack’s distributed development, and open structure, OpenStack Foundation Chief Operating Officer Mark Collier had to admit that the proprietary Amazon Web Services has a massive dominance in the market - describing it as “the monolith in the room”.

But even Amazon is not an enemy, said Collier, pointing out that many of the user case studies in the show keynotes - including the Expedia online travel service - make use of AWS alongside OpenStack. Public clouds based on OpenStack have an impressive footprint compared with AWS, he said, showing locations on a map.

Collier underlined OpenStack’s international status, by announcing the next two Summits will be outside the US, taking in Vancouver in May 2015 and Tokyo in October: “That’s fitting for a distributed community,” he said.