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VANCOUVER, B.C.—The dream of an OpenStack-powered planet is moving a step closer to reality. As the OpenStack Summit kicked off here today, the OpenStack Foundation announced the successful launch of new interoperability and federation initiatives that have been in the works for years.
The effort to define what OpenStack actually is has hit a new milestone with the launch of the OpenStack-powered initiative, Jonathan Bryce (pictured), executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, said during his keynote address.
The OpenStack-powered effort uses the DefCore definition for OpenStack to identify the technologies and application programming interfaces (APIs) that enable common services and interoperability across OpenStack cloud deployments.
“We have been working hard toward a global footprint of compute resources,” Bryce said.
The OpenStack Foundation is now rolling out its first round of interoperability testing that defines a common core for all OpenStack-powered platforms. The first group of companies that have successfully passed OpenStack-powered testing include Blue Box Cloud, Bright Computing, DataCentred, HP, IBM, Internap, Mirantis, Rackspace, Red Hat, SUSE, SwiftStack, Ubuntu, UnitedStack, Vexxhost and VMware.
“We’re taking a step toward creating an OpenStack-powered planet,” Bryce said.
Another big piece of enabling the OpenStack-powered planet is federated identity across multiple OpenStack implementations. That’s where federated identity comes into play, which is a key feature that landed in the OpenStack Kilo release. Federated identity is now helping change the way TV and films are made, enabling producers to leverage computing power around the world, Bryce explained.
Morgan Fainberg, project technical leader for the OpenStack Keystone identity project, joined Bryce on stage to discuss the new federation capabilities. “Now we can link OpenStack clouds with a single source of identity, so you can expand and contract dynamically,” Fainberg said.
The OpenStack Foundation today announced that 30 vendors have committed to supporting federated identity across OpenStack clouds.
“What we get when we put together interoperability and identity federation is we really start to see the full power of the OpenStack planet,” Bryce said. “That’s the vision that has powered OpenStack forward the last few years.”
Users also power OpenStack forward, and Bryce brought out some big-name vendors that are using OpenStack. Comcast, which first detailed its use of the technology at the OpenStack Portland event in 2013, now has more than 600 projects running on the OpenStack infrastructure. Comcast has also been a key contributor to OpenStack with more than 37,000 lines of code committed.
Walmart, which uses OpenStack to power its e-commerce efforts, employed the technology to support the company’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2014 sales events.
“Talk to any vendor today, and OpenStack is a de facto standard,” said Amandeep Singh Juneja,
senior director of cloud engineering and operations at WalmartLabs.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.