Today Cloud.com announced that we have joined the OpenStack Initiative, providing our commitment to support, collaborate and contribute to the success of this community and it’s efforts to drive open standards and innovation in the cloud computing market.
We are very excited to be part of this effort as it signifies a few significant tipping points in the industry, and share Rightscale’s view that this is a game changing event. Linux and many open source projects reached their curve in the “hockey stick” of growth only when the customers joined in the effort of advancing the market. On top of Rackspace and NASA, I think it speaks volumes to see the OpenStack initiative include NTT, Peer1, Limelight, Softlayer and others all joining together as part of this initiative. Think about that for a second. These are all competitors joining together to advance the market.
Back to Cloud.com’s role in this initiative. When I talk about joining the cause, I want to call out three specific areas that we are already working on with the OpenStack team.
- Cloud.com will be adopting the OpenStack Object Storage platform into our CloudStack product, allowing us to immediately deliver a cloud storage offering to our open source IAAS stack. We’ve been approached by a number of service providers and enterprises across the board looking for a storage service that would deliver an Amazon equivalent storage architecture within their cloud. Their challenge? Vendors that they were relying on went bust leaving them without a solution or a trusted provider to enable them with this technology. The significance of Rackspace’s contribution of the OpenStack Object Storage is that Cloud.com can now take a proven, scalable, in production object storage and make that available to our customers. That’s pretty cool. We will, of course, also be contributing back to the project areas where we can improve implementation, management and orchestration of the service.
- Cloud.com will also be adding the OpenStack API implementation to our Common Cloud Framework, enabling customers and developers to leverage their existing cloud deployments. Interoperability is a key pinpoint for developers, customers and users and we are at a crucial point in the growth of this market where we need to truly enable cloud interoperability in order to achieve hyper growth.
- We will also be using our expertise in building out highly scalable, multi-tenant cloud environments for SPs and Enterprises to help advance the OpenStack initiative. We’ve been extremely successful in deploying large scale, in-production clouds and are looking forward to contributing towards commercializing and packaging the OpenStack for production use.
OpenStack and Rackspace/NASA have been working to solve certain, hard technology problems around scale and reliability in the cloud. Cloud.com and CloudStack will enable these technologies to work for an enterprise by integrating this technology with back office functionality, delivering interoperability through common cloud API’s and integrating additional user management and administrative tooling in a supported and sustainable offering. This makes partnering and working with OpenStack.org a no brainer decision for us.
Learn more about our OpenStack momentum and other musings of Cloud.com on twitter @clouddotcom or @ulander
Congrats to the OpenStack team. As I read in a tweet on the announcement (which I should have saved for proper attribution), this is just the bottom of the first inning … but open source has just brought some big hitters to the game.
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