OpenStack is fast becoming the most important open source project in the industry to unify the growing number of cloud infrastructure vendors.  HP’s George Kadifa called OpenStack one of the most important projects to enable a new computing model.  The main reason according to HP’s Kadifa is the fact that no one vendor controls the process and the standards.

Tonight, Cloudscaling founder Randy Bias is hosting a conversation and debate to discuss the role Amazon Web Services plays in the acceleration of the OpenStack standards and the community (full details here).

In 2010 Rackspace with NASA created the open source project OpenStack to enable organizations to run cloud services on commodity hardware.  The mission of the project was to provide a framework and code to provide an open source, massively scalable, elastic cloud computing platform (aka Infrastructure as a Service – IaaS) for both public and private clouds.

Cloud computing market is exploding.  According to Gartner, the total addressable market (TAM) is larger than $160b for private, public, and hybrid cloud.  Hybrid cloud is spending is expected to be >$20 billion by 2015.   The top uses cases for Hybrid cloud are 1) cloud bursting for on-demand capacity; 2) multiple application architectures; 3) Disaster recovery; 4) Backup and archive; 5) Datacenter migration.

The cloud technology and solutions conversations are shifting to three major fronts:  1) infrastructure commoditization where IaaS is the layer that is “hardening” to provide enablement and scale for cloud platforms and new cloud-based applications; 2) Platform as a Service (PaaS) is where we are seeing general purpose and purpose built platforms for specific uses cases where software can leverage the scale of the commodity infrastructure; 3) Agile applications for rapidly build scalable apps required for this new software-led infrastructure (new web & mobile apps).

The OpenStack project is managed by the OpenStack Foundation a non profit founded in September 2012, and continues to gain serious momentum from open source proponents, startups and computing vendors.   The Foundation has already attracted more than 7,000 individual members from 100 countries and over 800 different organizations, support from over 500 developers, almost a million lines of code, and has raised more than $10 million in funding.

Key components of OpenStack

• OpenStack Compute (Nova)
• OpenStack Image Service (Glance)
• OpenStack Networking (Neutron)
• OpenStack Object Store (Swift)
• OpenStack  Block Store (Cinder)
• OpenStack Identity (Keystone)
• OpenStack Dashboard (Horizon)
• OpenStack Orchestration (Heat)
• OpenStack Metering ( Ceilometer)

OpenStack is important because it is taking shape like other successful innovations in open source.   Proprietary solutions create alternatives:  Unix enabled the Linux community and market and we saw proprietary databases  enabled MySQL.  Today it’s open compute, networking, and storage.  Hello, OpenStack.

OpenStack drives down the infrastructure costs because of the free software and the leverage of the commodity hardware.  Companies will provide free software and make their money with paid support and services.    Even large Service Providers, Carriers, and Telcos are deploying clouds to gain operational efficiencies.  We are seeing big names such as Swisscom, ATT, T-Mobile, NTT, China Mobile deploying production OpenStack clouds.

Innovation in Software

OpenStack validates our vision that software is leading the infrastructure game.  Software-led infrastructures (SLI) will be key differentiator for value creation.

SLI innovation will sit on top of reliable “enabling” infrastructure (IaaS for Cloud) similar to lower level of the OSI stack in the 90s which created a massive value market with the client server boom. OpenStack is IaaS and this creates an opportunity for software to orchestrate OpenStack resources for application deployment within policy and enterprise governance.   At the same time this will create lots of PaaS and application opportunities if IaaS is “hardened”.

We will be watching this closely  as OpenStack continues to reduce infrastructure costs (IaaS), creates alternatives to vendors management capabilities, and pushes solutions up the stack.

Dave Vellante and I talk all the time on @theCUBE about the need for all the major vendors to seriously start pushing their value “up the stack”.  This is the big opportunity.  Software-led infrastructure is enabling the “software is eating the world” trend.