How we view OpenStack within our community here is usually vastly different than the majority of enterprises and how they view it. Side note: My biggest gripe with OpenStack leadership is actually that everything is viewed from the lens of a developer which, I feel, is contributing to the plateau/decline in its adoption. That is but that's a topic for another day.

Most organizations ( as I've seen anyway) view OpenStack as a product that is compared to other cloud products like vCloud Director/similar. And after 8 years architecting clouds with it, I see it the same way. So I'm not exactly inclined to split hairs with how it is characterized.

Bottom line though, ensuring that non-developers are able to easily able to get their questions answered will, in my personal opinion, either promote OpenStack or promote the conception that it requires a team of developers to understand and run which kills any serious consideration in the boardroom.

Sorry to the OP, didn't mean to hijack your thread here. :) just raises an important topic th get I see come up over and over.

//adam

On Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 2:43 AM Jeremy Stanley <fungi@yuggoth.org> wrote:
On 2020-01-17 21:24:36 +0530 (+0530), Adam Peacock wrote:
[...]
> Also, we need to be clear not everyone leans towards being a
> developer or even *wants* to go in that direction when using
> OpenStack. In fact, most don't and if there is that expectation by
> those entrenched with the OpenStack product, the OpenStack option
> gets dropped in favor of something else. It's developer-friendly
> but we need to be mega-mega-careful, as a community, to ensure
> development isn't the baseline or assumption for adequate support
> or to get questions answered. Especially since we've converged our
> communication channels.
[...]

Most users probably won't become developers on OpenStack, but some
will, and I believe its long-term survival depends on that so we
should do everything we can to encourage it. Users may also
contribute in a variety of other ways like bug reporting and triage,
outreach, revising or translating documentation, and so on.

OpenStack isn't a "product," it's a community software collaboration
on which many companies have built products (either by running it as
a service or selling support for it). Treating the community the way
you might treat a paid vendor is where all of this goes to a bad
place very quickly.
--
Jeremy Stanley