Open Stack

>From Jim Curry on the OpenStack.org BlogŠ.
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 wasn¹t 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 weren¹t 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 didn¹t know was
whether anyone else saw the world as we did.

A year later, its obvious we weren¹t alone.  Consider these stats:
* We grew from 2 organizations to over 89
* We grew from a couple dozen developers to nearly 250 unique contributors
in the Cactus release and over 1,200 in the development community
* Over 35,000 downloads from Launchpad and thousands more from our ecosystem
* 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.
* Our initial conference and design summit had over 100 people, while the
last in April hosted over 450
* We have delivered 3 major releases and are halfway to the fourth
* 17 countries have active participants and user groups now exist on 5
continents 
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 who¹s 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.

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:
* 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.
* Reference hardware architectures from the likes of Dell, Cisco, Intel and
AMD for OpenStack. 
* 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.
* Support for OpenStack deployments by the likes of Cloudscaling, Cybera and
Rackspace Cloud Builders.
* Deployment support from Puppet Labs and Opscode.
* A host of tools and software integration from scores of companies
including Scalr, Rightscale, FathomDB, enStratus, and many others.
* 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).
Most importantly, enterprises are really beginning to deploy OpenStack.  It
wasn¹t 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.

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!


- - - 
Stephen Spector, Rackspace
OpenStack Community Manager
stephen.spector at openstack.org
OpenStack Blog <http://openstack.org/blog>  | @opnstk_
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