Rackspace and NASA Contribute Huge to Open Source

Today Rackspace and NASA announced OpenStack as a coordinated open development project with 28 participating partner companies and growing. NASA contributed source code from its NOVA project for running a large scale computing platform called Nebula. Rackspace contributed source code for its Object Store, used to host the Cloud Files web storage service. The API for Cloud Servers, which was previously released with a Creative Commons open license will be used by OpenStack. I was a key contributor to the design of that API, and I’m honored to have been a part of it. Rackspace has vowed a commitment to open development of this platform.

This is very exciting for consumers of Cloud Computing because:

1. It allows individual companies to run their own clouds inside their own data centers and on their own equipment using the same scalable technology that powers some of the largest cloud infrastructures in the world.
2. An individual company can develop applications on their own cloud, and know with confidence that they can run their application on a number of different public clouds without any special adapter software. They need only find a cloud computing or cloud storage provider that uses OpenStack software to ensure compatibility.
3. If an application is hosted on one OpenStack public cloud, it can be easily moved to another without changes to the application source code, and without using any cloud middleware. This can completely eliminate all fears relating to single-vendor lock-in.
4. Applications can be run simultaneously in multiple clouds using the exact same software that needs to only implement a single API for universal access to computing and object storage resources.