I worked for a company (Nobis Technology Group) that was acquired by LeaseWeb USA; I was a part of the "server automation" team and was somewhat reluctantly "forced out" of the team after the transition (they basically offered to pay me a smaller salary to work for them - do I look stupid?).

The team was essentially dissolved several months later, as I knew it would be.

But for the short period I was there (about 2 years), it was a great place to work, and a high point in my total career. Prior to that position, I had been doing web development in PHP pretty much exclusively. Doing server automation was a completely new space to me.

Soon after starting, our team was tasked with a migration to OpenStack. Since our current infrastructure front-end was already based on PHP, I got tasked with looking into how or if we could use PHP OpenCloud to work with OpenStack. It seemed workable to me; I was able to extend the classes in such a way using namespaces and other techniques so that we could add additional capabilities to the interface that weren't already supported (and there were a lot of holes to fill!), but wouldn't break things if/when we had to upgrade OpenCloud (this was ultimately tested a couple times I was there, and the changes proved flawless - at least on the PHP side).

Ultimately, we had a nice stable front-end that worked well with both our original system (some VM architecture that I forget) and the new "cloud" infrastructure based around OpenStack. In effect, a user could deploy either an actual server (if available), provision a VM (if a server was available), or build a cloud server "system" from a myriad of parts (we tried to support and provide as much access to the OpenStack stuff as we could). We also had a RESTful API for clients to also used (some of our clients resold our services under their own names). Some of the backend stuff was a bit "messy" in how it worked (I won't go into details, but I "authored" a fake "O'Reilly" "book" (really just a front "cover" mainly) whose mascot was dickbutt) - but despite the mess, overall it worked well, considering all the moving parts (where it would tend to fall down - not always, but enough - was when an upgrade to OpenStack was performed).

In short - we were also one of the few companies running OpenStack in production. Our owners ended up selling to LeaseWeb, I left - but the idea was that LeaseWeb wanted to transition things to their API and system, and I honestly don't know what happened with all the work and such I was involved in on the PHP side of things (there was also a point where me and a coworker had to quickly ramp up and learn GoLang to make an interface from Rancher/Docker over to the Nobis API - that was a fun and interesting experience). I imagine that some portion is still running, but who knows.

I personally think that in the right hands and with the right infrastructure OpenStack can be a very workable and working technology. It seemed to work well for the systems we used while I was at Nobis. I don't know honestly whether you could use it to scale up to anything like AWS or Google's offerings, but I think for medium-sized stuff like we were doing (or like Digital Ocean does - who at the time was our direct competition), it can work well - at least as I experienced things.