A few days after Microsoft announced their Azure Platform Appliance, a new Cloud OS entered the scene – OpenStack. While most Cloud OSes out there are proprietary, OpenStack is an open source cloud OS(Its being provided under the Apache 2.0 license) that is being jointly developed by RackSpace and NASA.
What the software does: The goal of OpenStack is to allow any organization to create and offer cloud computing capabilities using open source software running on standard hardware. OpenStack Compute is software for automatically creating and managing large groups of virtual private servers. OpenStack Storage is software for creating redundant, scalable object storage using clusters of commodity servers to store terabytes or even petabytes of data.–OpenStack
RackSpace has been offering Cloud services for four years now and serves tens of thousands of customers on its cloud platform. OpenStack will gain from RackSpace’s experience with its CloudServer and CloudFile offering, basically taking the code of those two projects and offering them as “OpenStack Compute” and “OpenStack Object Storage”. NASA will be contributing to the code from their Nebula Cloud Platform.
Since OpenStack is going to be based on code already in use, it wont have the growing pains that other new Cloud OSes are experiencing. OpenStack hope that offering the OS as open source under the Apache 2.0 license will help ‘foster badly-needed cloud standards, remove the fear of proprietary lock-in for cloud customers, and create a large ecosystem that spans cloud providers‘.
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