Seven Key Milestones in OpenStack’s Five-Year History

OpenStack, which just turned 5 years old, has emerged as one of the leading cloud platforms, and now its member roster includes governments and major companies.

OpenStack was formed in July 2010 with two core components, NASA’s Nebula compute project, which was renamed Nova, and Rackspace’s Swift storage projects.

The OpenStack Foundation was officially launched in September 2012, providing a multi-stakeholder governance model beyond just Rackspace.

Today, OpenStack’s supporting company list reads like a who’s who of the IT industry. At the top tier are the platinum members, including AT&T, Canonical, HP, IBM, Intel, Rackspace, Red Hat and SUSE.

The first two projects that laid the foundation for OpenStack are the Nova compute project and the Swift storage project.

Soon after the initial release of OpenStack in 2010, multiple new projects emerged to create a more robust platform that enables infrastructure-as-a-service technology. Among the first new projects to be integrated into OpenStack were the Glance image, Horizon dashboard and Keystone identity projects.

For the next major release of OpenStack, code named Liberty and scheduled to debut later this year, the open-source cloud platform is moving to a more inclusive model for project inclusion known as the “Big Tent.” Under the Big Tent, there are multiple new projects, including Magnum containers, Murano app catalog and Congress policy projects.

Users are perhaps the single biggest force in the OpenStack community, defining needs and pushing the platform forward. Big-name users include Walmart, Best Buy, Comcast, AT&T, Yahoo, eBay and the U.S. National Security Agency.