OpenStack was originally started in 2010 as an IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) cloud computing
joint project between Rackspace and NASA. The reins have since been
turned over to the new OpenStack Foundation, which is now finally
official, complete with a 24-member board chaired by Suse executive and
Linux Foundation director Alan Clark. The group has grown to more than
5,600 individual members across 87 countries and 850 different
organizations, and is financial backed by more than $10 million in
funding.
The question now is, can this open source cloud project
really thrive and survive in this competitive market? The
community-at-large is watching to see how the foundation handles itself
now that there are so many competing interests within its own membership
-- especially with the recently added and most controversial new
member, VMware.
The OpenStack Foundation is already taking shape as a compelling
force in cloud computing, and has an admirable mission of enabling any
organization to create and offer cloud computing services while running
on standard hardware. The group had been getting early traction behind
its united front for creating a competitive open source cloud stack
before proprietary software vendors like VMware could swallow the
market, like it had done with server virtualization.
That's why many eyebrows were raised when VMware announced it would apply to become a member of the group just as it started to get organized. VMware has been shifting its sole focus away from server virtualization
as the hypervisor slowly becomes commoditized, and to further that end,
VMware in July acquired cloud automation and provisioning specialist DynamicOps and later paid $1.26 billion for Nicira,
a startup in the network virtualization space and lead code contributor
to the OpenFlow and software-defined networking OpenStack project.
Members
of the OpenStack community weren't sure what the Nicira acquisition
would mean for existing projects. With Nicira being such a major driving
force behind the virtual networking project, some worried that VMware
might use the acquisition to take a major piece off the playing board
and in effect slow the progress OpenStack had been making.
...MORE
Read the entire InfoWorld Virtualization Report article.