OpenStack Icehouse Cloud Debuted With Heavyweight Support

by Sean Michael Kerner

Over the last two years, the number of developers authoring and committing code to OpenStack has grown from 248 authors and 4,083 code commits in the April 2012 OpenStack Essex release to 1,202 authors and 17,209 code commits in OpenStack Icehouse.

Red Hat is the top corporate contributor to the OpenStack Icehouse release as measured by the volume of code commits. Red Hat has been the top contributor to OpenStack for at least a year and was previously identified as the top code contributor during the OpenStack Grizzly release cycle in 2013.

The position of top commit author for OpenStack has changed from release to release. For the OpenStack Havana release cycle, Bitergia identified Red Hat’s Mark McLoughlin as the top author of commits. During the Icehouse cycle, Suse’s Andreas Jaeger topped the list with 654 commits.

OpenStack as a cloud computing platform is made up of multiple projects. During the Icehouse development cycle, the most active project within OpenStack in terms of code commits and authors was the Nova compute project.

Code commits are only one measure of activity; another key metric is the volume of mailing list activity, which has also grown over the last year. During the OpenStack Grizzly release cycle, there were some 332 mailing list participants, who sent a total of 8,961 emails. In contrast, during the OpenStack Icehouse release cycle, there were 1,746 participants, who sent a total of 23,077 emails.

In addition to being the top code committer to OpenStack Icehouse, Red Hat also leads the list for the total volume of email messages sent.

Another key metric for tracking activity in an open-source effort is the number of issues that are opened and closed during a development cycle. During Icehouse, 9,905 issues were opened and 4,487 were closed.

No contributing OpenStack vendor closed more issues during the Icehouse development cycle than Red Hat. Hewlett-Packard, Mirantis, IBM, Rackspace and Canonical all participated, as well, to help close tickets for Icehouse.

When it comes down to individuals that helped to close issue tickets, NEC developer Akihiro Motoki tops the list, followed by VMware developer Aaron Rosen.