Despite its flaws, OpenStack is ready for enterprise use — and well-positioned to join Amazon Web Services, Azure, Google, and VMware’s vCloud Air as one of five public cloud camps that are forming, according to new Forrester research.

OpenStack is well suited for application development, but organizations need to be aware of the following 10 pitfalls and challenges:

  • Unforeseen downtime during upgrading isn’t a resolved issue.
  • Keeping up with releases and updates is difficult for most enterprises.
  • OpenStack reboots the network interface again and again.
  • Provisioning loads of 50 or more virtual machines suffer from delays.
  • Direct adopter competency takes four to six months.
  • Software-defined networking (SDN) is immature.
  • Security in OpenStack requires due diligence.
  • Vendor participation is not altruistic.
  • Reference architecture improvements lag.
  • OpenStack is not a cloud manager or platform-as-a-service.

Learn more about the research here.