Linux and Open Source: OpenStack Is Pushing Ahead in the Open-Source Cloud Space
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OpenStack, a popular open-source platform for public and private clouds, celebrates its second anniversary this week. The O'Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON) will hold an "OpenStack Day" to help celebrate the milestone. The OpenStack mission is to enable any organization to create and offer cloud computing services running on standard hardware. OpenStack is used by corporations, service providers, value-added resellers, small and midsize businesses, researchers, and global data centers looking to deploy large-scale cloud installations for private or public clouds leveraging the support and resulting technology of a global open-source community. In July 2010, Rackspace Hosting and NASA jointly launched a new open-source cloud initiative known as OpenStack. The community's first official release, code-named Austin, was made available just four months later with plans to release regular updates of the software every few months. The latest, and fifth, release of OpenStack is known as the Essex release. The next release, expected in late September, just prior to the OpenStack Summit in October, will be the "Folsom" release. Among other new features, Folsom will feature a new network service known as "Quantum," which will control network virtualization.
Mass of Contributors
OpenStack community officials say Linux is a great example of an open-source technology that has been widely adopted. However, comparatively, OpenStack has been and is being adopted and supported faster than Linux. For instance, OpenStack reached the same amount of contributors as Linux in one-seventh the time.
