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.
Why open matters: All of the code for OpenStack is freely available under the Apache 2.0 license. Anyone can run it, build on it, or submit changes back to the project. We strongly believe that an open development model is the only way to foster badly-needed cloud standards, remove the fear of proprietary lock-in for cloud customers, and create a large ecosystem that spans cloud providers.
Who it's for: Institutions and service providers with physical hardware that they'd like to use for large-scale cloud deployments. (Additionally, companies who have specific requirements that prevent them from running in a public cloud.)
How it's being used today: Organizations like Rackspace Hosting and NASA are using OpenStack technologies to manage tens of thousands of compute instances and petabytes of storage.
Timeline: Openstack was announced July 19th, 2010. While many components of OpenStack have been used in production for years, we are in the very early stages of our efforts to offer these technologies broadly as open source software. Early code is now available on LaunchPad, with an inital release for OpenStack Storage expected in mid-September and an initial release for OpenStack Compute expected in mid-October.
Many more answers are available in the OpenStack FAQ.
A way for the community to learn about all the various activities occurring on a weekly basis
OpenStack is pleased to open registration for the Design Summit San Antonio 2010 from November 9 – 12, 2010. Due to facility limitations we are only accepting 300 registrations for this event so please register soon to avoid complications.
To give the community some additional time, we’ve extended the nomination deadline to October 15th, 2010. Read the details in Mark's blog post.
Having spent the last three years managing the open source Xen.org community, Stephen Spector has now joined OpenStack to continue his promotion and support of open source technologies. Welcome, Stephen!
Mark Collier blogs about the governance model for the OpenStack community. Read the governance documents and learn how to participate in the upcomming elections.
Wow, what a crazy month it has been! Jim Curry blogs about the activity so far and what's planned for the upcomming October 21 "Austin" release of OpenStack.
The Second OpenStack Design Conference is scheduled for November 9th-12th in San Antonio, Texas.
Bringing extensive experience in creating killer documentation for open source projects, Anne Gentle has joined OpenStack and blogs about her first steps, plus how you can help build in documentation as part of the ethos of our community.
Mike Mayo illustrates how you can both launch and configure OpenStack servers from an iPad using the new Chef integration.
Since the launch of the project, we've reached some significant milestones. Mark Collier shares some of the latest.
3 hypervisors in three weeks. @openstack now supports KVM, Xen, and VirtualBox. Kudos to Justin from @FathomDB and Ewan from @Citrix.
Thanks to all of the #hackers on #OpenStack, 1000+ commits, 20+ bug fixes, (in a week) and lots of big new features in branches.
Peder Ulander announces that Cloud.com has joined the OpenStack Initiative.
