OpenStack Foundation Launches Marking the Beginning of a New Era in Cloud Computing

Started in July 2010, OpenStack was a joint effort between Rackspace and NASA to develop an alternative to proprietary IaaS offerings. Though NASA withdrew its resources contributing to the development efforts, OpenStack continued to gain support from the industry. Some of the well known Public Clouds based on OpenStack include HP, AT&T and Internap which endorsed the growing maturity of the stack.

In October 2011, Rackspace announced that it would be handing over the ownership of OpenStack to an independent foundation to take the initiative forward. OpenStack Foundation is launched with a 24-member board that is chaired by Alan Clark, an executive from SUSE who is also a director at Linux Foundation. Jonathan Bryce, co-founder of Rackspace and one of the key members of the OpenStack Project Policy Board will take up the role of Executive Director of the foundation. The foundation will hire 10-12 employees across the globe to run the marketing, operations and evangelism. OpenStack Foundation already has 5,600 individual members from 88 countries across 6 continents. It’s interesting to note that India is one of the top 5 countries in terms of individual membership.

The sixth release of OpenStack is expected in October that will bring additional features related to networking and storage. The community is planning for a 4-day event in San Diego that aims to bring the developers, IT professionals and community members together.

With Citrix handing over CloudStack to Apache, OpenStack has a real competition in the form of another open source implementation. Many experts believe that CloudStack is more complete than OpenStack. But with the backing from the industry biggies like IBM, HP, Red Hat and SUSE, it’s a matter of time before OpenStack becomes feature rich to match the competition. The IaaS landscape is currently fragmented with majority of the implementations being on VMware followed by Citrix, Microsoft, Eucalyptus and OpenStack. If OpenStack delivers its promise, we will be seeing many Private Clouds and Public Clouds powered by a homogenous stack making it easy for the enterprises to move their workloads back and forth. Let’s hope that OpenStack delivers it!

- Janakiram MSV, Chief Editor, CloudStory.in