<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: 14px; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; "><div><div><div>From Jim Curry on the OpenStack.org Blog….</div><div><p>A year into the life of OpenStack, it seems like its success should
have been more obvious. The market lacked an open platform designed
specifically for building and managing a cloud. We knew that fact at Rackspace because we had been forced to build our own solution. For
five years we looked for off the shelf technologies that could power our
public cloud but never found an acceptable solution. So we kept
building our own proprietary technology. But that wasn’t the right
answer. As a company, we had always relied on standardized technologies
to power our offers. Technologies that our customers were also running
in their own datacenters. But in cloud, such standards did not exist
and were nowhere in sight. Certainly, the ones that were emerging were
not completely open. And by building our own solution — one not
available to anyone else — we weren’t actually helping to solve the
problem. So we decided to open source our technology, and make it
available for use by our competitors and customers alike. What we
didn’t know was whether anyone else saw the world as we did.</p>
<p>A year later, its obvious we weren’t alone. Consider these stats:</p>
<ul>
<li>We grew from 2 organizations to over 89</li>
<li>We grew from a couple dozen developers to nearly 250 unique
contributors in the Cactus release and over 1,200 in the development
community</li>
<li>Over 35,000 downloads from Launchpad and thousands more from our ecosystem</li>
<li>The scope of the project has truly evolved into a cloud operating
system, tackling a diverse range of cloud infrastructure needs such as
networking, load balancers and database.</li>
<li>Our initial conference and design summit had over 100 people, while the last in April hosted over 450</li>
<li>We have delivered 3 major releases and are halfway to the fourth</li>
<li>17 countries have active participants and user groups now exist on 5 continents</li>
</ul>
<p>One of the key reasons OpenStack has been successful is that it has
such an audacious mission — to build an operating system to power both
public and private clouds. We believe that while public and private
clouds do have different requirements, much of the core need is shared.
Things such as basic management, self-service and scalability.
OpenStack started with the large scale cloud expertise of Rackspace and
NASA and has since added a wealth of knowledge from a who’s who list contributors with broad-ranging enterprise and service provider
expertise. All of these participants recognize that in order for the promise of cloud to be realized — for workloads to seamlessly migrate
from one environment to another — a common platform is required inside
the enterprise DC as well as the public cloud. The technology should also be purpose-built for cloud, rather than a bolt-on to existing
server virtualization technologies. And that solution should be open and controlled by a vast community rather than a single vendor.</p>
<p>The shared community desire for an open cloud operating system
powering both public and private clouds has resulted in a flurry of
activity around OpenStack. Consider the following:</p>
<ul>
<li>Major enterprise software companies such as Citrix and Canonical, as
well as startups such as StackOps, have announced commerical
distributions of OpenStack. This is a very key development for
enterprise adoption.</li>
<li>Reference hardware architectures from the likes of Dell, Cisco, Intel and AMD for OpenStack.</li>
<li>The contributions from service providers and announcement of public
clouds powered by OpenStack including Rackspace, Internap, Dreamhost,
Dell, Korea Telecom, Memset and Nephoscale among others.</li>
<li>Support for OpenStack deployments by the likes of Cloudscaling, Cybera and Rackspace Cloud Builders.</li>
<li>Deployment support from Puppet Labs and Opscode.</li>
<li>A host of tools and software integration from scores of companies
including Scalr, Rightscale, FathomDB, enStratus, and many others.</li>
<li>Venture funding and M&A activity have picked up in the
community, including the recent funding of Piston and the acquisition of
Cloud.com by Citrix (both OpenStack community members).</li>
</ul>
<p>Most importantly, enterprises are really beginning to deploy
OpenStack. It wasn’t until the Cactus release in April that OpenStack
truly became ready for production deployments. But during the 3 months
since that release, the number of companies deploying the technologies
is truly remarkable. Expect to see many of these stories coming to
light in the next few months.</p>
<p>Thank you to everyone who has made OpenStack happen over the last
year! It has been an incredibly rewarding experience to be part of such
an engaged and diverse community committed to the goal of an open cloud
operating system. Happy first birthday to all!</p></div><div><br></div><div><div>- - - </div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" color="rgb(0, 0, 0)"><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Calibri">Stephen Spector, Rackspace</font></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" color="rgb(0, 0, 0)"><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Calibri">OpenStack Community Manager</font></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" color="rgb(0, 0, 0)"><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Calibri"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px;"></span></font></font><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Calibri; "><a href="mailto:stephen.spector@openstack.org">stephen.spector@openstack.org</a></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Calibri; "><a href="http://openstack.org/blog">OpenStack Blog</a><b> | </b><a href="http://twitter.com/opnstk_com_mgr">@opnstk_</a><a href="http://twitter.com/opnstk_com_mgr">com</a><a href="http://twitter.com/opnstk_com_mgr">_mgr</a><span style="font-style: italic"></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Calibri; "><b>Office</b> +1 (512) 539-1162 | <b>Mobile</b> +1 (210) 415-0930</span></div></div></div></div></body></html>