It's a thing in that it exists, can be deployed, has industry backing and a lot of hype around it. And enough mindshare that no direct (open) competitor has a chance.
But the difference between what it claims to be able to do and what you want to actually use without hiring a bunch of developers (if possible, those that build the feature you are interested in) is also a thing. Anything going above a basic feature set is quite tricky, and many components are of bad quality. Or have undocumented specialties and the only way to get support that can help is to track down the original developers on IRC. Or 3 components share a concept, but all do it in slightly different ways.
To many cooks and all that... Many developers have recognized that, but cleaning up takes time & there are new bits and features added all the time.
Which also means that if someone doesn't need the full feature set OpenStack promises a competitor (like using containers & Kubernetes maybe) can easily beat it.
(I don't have that much experience using it myself, but I've heard the above from many developers, vendors and people trying to use it on conferences and online)
I'm well aware of all you have state, difficulties, to many cooks... [I'm one of the top 3 contributors to openstack right now]; but what u have just described IMHO is applicable to all projects that gain momentum (I mean look at what happened to node.js and io.js and the split or whatever that happened there), linux itself has lots of similarities (or so I have heard) so I am thinking this is just the nature of the game...
TLDR; software takes time to mature, software that is subject to hype probably takes a little more time to mature (due to more people/cooks and more hype).
thing is, you can deploy node.js or io.js, and they largely work according to the description or the documentation. Having seen 4 sequential openstack deployment failures and rollbacks, I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.
Out of curiosity where did these 4 sequential openstack deployment failures and rollbacks happen? Would whoever this is be willing to share 'their story' (because if they do they can help, the software matures and get better, if they don't share it, then well nobody can fix problems that won't be talked about/shared); at yahoo we've had 4+ deployments and have not had a issue (but we also have engineers and operators who know openstack in & out).
I would put it differently: OpenStack is how you do IaaS with long-lived, mutable server instances ("pets").
Kubernetes is how you do IaaS with immutable, disposable application instances ("cattle").
I've used both. OpenStack is indeed complex and brittle (but if you get it working and leave it alone, it works well). I'm excited about k8s but it's too new to pass much judgement on yet.
And in the end the problem they solve is "running applications", and for some applications that don't strictly require IaaS they are competitors. (e.g. if someone is migrating web apps off AWS, moving to a private OpenStack instance might seem like an obvious solution (like AWS, but on your own hardware), but maybe moving to a PaaS solution is the better choice, even if it requires changes to the apps)
But the difference between what it claims to be able to do and what you want to actually use without hiring a bunch of developers (if possible, those that build the feature you are interested in) is also a thing. Anything going above a basic feature set is quite tricky, and many components are of bad quality. Or have undocumented specialties and the only way to get support that can help is to track down the original developers on IRC. Or 3 components share a concept, but all do it in slightly different ways.
To many cooks and all that... Many developers have recognized that, but cleaning up takes time & there are new bits and features added all the time.
Which also means that if someone doesn't need the full feature set OpenStack promises a competitor (like using containers & Kubernetes maybe) can easily beat it.
(I don't have that much experience using it myself, but I've heard the above from many developers, vendors and people trying to use it on conferences and online)