OpenStack.org: RackSpace Open Sources Their Cloud Services Platform, And Gets NASA On Board

Jul 18, 2010

Hosting company RackSpace is open sourcing the software behind its cloud storage and computing platforms on Monday, the company is saying. The company is also preparing to launch OpenStack, an open source cloud platform, and will donate the open source code to that project.

NASA is also incorporating technology from the NASA Nebula Cloud Platform into the OpenStack project, says RackSpace.

RackSpace says they want to drive interoperability in cloud services to avoid vendor lock-in, and help create industry standards. More than 25 companies have shown interest in the project, says RackSpace, or are actively working on the code. They include AMD, Citrix, Cloud.com, Cloudkick, CloudSwitch, Dell, enStratus, FathomDB, Limelight, Nicira, NTT DATA, Opscode, Peer 1, Puppet Labs, RightScale, Riptano, Scalr, Sonian, Spiceworks and Zuora.

The code is being released under the extremely flexible Apache 2 license, meaning third parties can redistribute the code, build proprietary software around the code, and distribute it with few restrictions.

CrunchBase Information

Rackspace

Information provided by CrunchBase

James

*yawn*
James in Action!

How excellent of the idea! Thats the true future of the Cloud.
http://intensedebate.com/people/Scobleizer Scobleizer

I give my reasoning of why this is important: http://scobleizer.com/2010/07/18/rackspace-announ...
http://intensedebate.com/profiles/ericzoo ericzoo

This is a very well-thought out and forward thinking strategy on Rackspace's part. The company just got lots of momentum to own the space.
http://www.facebook.com/simonchan Simon Chan

GG Rackspace. Well played on your end.
http://ilikekillnerds.com Dwayne

You obviously don't care about cloud technology or even know what it is, so why did you even bother commenting?
http://quicloud.com rICh

Way to go Rackspace!!! Can't wait to get my hands on the source.
http://www.coachlikeapro.com/ basketball coaching

Brilliant idea. Cloud’s future is bright. They gonna rock
http://www.facebook.com/fahdoo Fahd Butt

Anyone know why Amazon isn't a part of this, considering they're such a big player?
http://www.cdnpal.com Christopher

I think that this is a good move. Google should have released the server side code stack to App Engine, and their Big Table implementation. There's HBase though. I dunno that this will be really popular as there are so many choices for visualization and cloud computing abstraction now.
http://www.cdnpal.com Christopher

Sorry, I wrote visualization, but I meant to write virtualization.
http://www.facebook.com/mattias.johansson Mattias Petter Johansson

As far as I see it, this is a move AGAINST Amazon, from Rackspace. In the same manner GOOG released Android to keep the iPhone from gaining too much dominance, Rackspace don't want the Amazon to have too much cloud cake.
http://www.spinxwebdesign.com/ Web Design LA

Wow. Good move. This will surely benefit many organizations.
http://twitter.com/dexin @dexin

Enterprise can build their internal storage (or computing) cloud using Openstack, but how can they federate the internal cloud with one or more public cloud such as Amazon S3, Google Storage, EMC Atmos, AliCloud and many others? The matter of facts are these public cloud providers have invested a lot and won't switch to Openstack and all of them have different APIs. So this Openstack project has not resolved Vendor lock in issue as it claims to be.
http://intensedebate.com/profiles/igalin iGalin

Feels like the end to Amazon's EC2 services…
Rob

I’m not sure people want to federate between internal and external cloud. You want to be able to dynamically tap cloud service outside and integrate with it but if the data security or performance requirements were such that you chose private, would you want to mix that up with public?
Frank Daley

The goals sound very similar to those of Deltacloud that was announced by Red Hat in September 2009!

And it is interesting that less than two weeks ago Deltacloud became an Apache Incubator project > http://incubator.apache.org/

Am I correct in my understanding that Openstack and Deltacloud are trying to achieve the same goal?
http://projectdatasoft.blogspot.com/ andrew soft

seems a good idea.. it will greatly help other companies anyway.
78matt

I’m really sure lot’s of you are like jokes.

Why not share here your favorite jokes so others can know about it :)

Below is my favorite joke which is Needles Are Not Nice

Bill and Bob, two children, were sitting outside a clinic. Bill happened to be crying very loudly.

“Why are you crying?” Bob asked.

“I came here for a blood test,” sobbed Bill.

“So? Are you afraid?”

“No. For the blood test, they cut my finger.

As Bob heard this, he immediately began crying profusely.

Astonished, Bill stopped his tears and asked Bob, “Why are you crying now?”

To which Bob replied, “I came for a urine test!”

Bob was very stupid, thinking his vital will be cut for a urine test
dexin

Of course enterprise want to be able to federate between internal and public clouds. The follow article on CIO.com recently talking about “When combining cloud computing services with internal systems, confusion reigns. The reasons: lack of standards, concerns about availability and the potential for vendor lock-in.”

http://www.cio.com/article/593811/Cloud_Computing_What_CIOs_Need_to_Know_About_Integration?page=1&taxonomyId=3234
http://automationbusinesstech.com/ Ioannis Giannaros

I read about this on the new york times. I could have never thought that somebody will provide an open source platform that will be located on their servers. Extreme security vulnerability..