I am a relatively new father to an almost 2-year-old boy. I am very familiar with the unexpectedly fast pace of growth for a baby. How the milestones fly by. How I like to think about where he will be in 3, 5, and 80 years. It’s ironic that OpenStack and my son aren’t far apart. They both seem hellbent on world domination. And man it’s fun to be involved!
I have been involved with OpenStack since it was a twinkle in Rackspace’s eye. We often joke about how hard it was to convince our management and board to give away the core set of assets in which we invested so much. In truth, it wasn’t that hard. We have always known our core asset was really Fanatical Support, the service we provide on top of the best technology offerings in the market. There was no need for us to own the technology. We just needed access to the best. It needed to be an industry standard. And it needed to meet the requirements of our customers. The problem was that did not exist in the cloud software space. So it made clear sense to for us to take the lead.
The real question was whether or not the world saw the problem we did. Would they care? More importantly, would they join?
The answer: It’s too early to say yes, but this baby does seem to be headed toward the gifted and talented program. Here are some facts:
- We now have approximately 130 registered developers on the project, about 25 from Rackspace, and well over 150 developers consistently in our IRC channel.
- Over 1,000 individuals are actively participating in the project in some way.
- In just the last month, 78 different people submitted code, and we’ve had nearly 1,500 commits.
- We had our first commercial deployment outside of Rackspace and NASA…and more are coming.
- Over 40 companies have joined the project and are hiring, contribution, promoting and using OpenStack.
- Black Duck named OpenStack the #2 open source project launched last year
And we are achieving our roadmap goals very quickly. Object Storage (Swift) is ready for prime time and is being adopted quickly. The Austin release of Compute (Nova) brought us a preview, Bexar will be enterprise-ready and Cactus launches service provider scale. We are getting many great ideas for the community on how to move even faster. It’s clear the world wants an open alternative to the likes of Amazon and VMware. And they are pushing this baby to grow up fast.
We have a long way to go, and undoubtedly there will be rough spots as there are with any growing baby. But it’s amazing to see how many people want to parent OpenStack into adulthood. We are very appreciative of your commitment to the cause, and humbled to be a part of it.
Just imagine what this baby could be doing in 10 years.
Jim Curry
@jimcurry
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