It has been four years since OpenStack was officially launched – as the cooperative celebrates, we take a look at the major milestones this open source initiative has accomplished, and what the future holds.

In a blog post, Paul Voccio, Rackspace Senior Director and Product Software Engineering, shared just some of the highlights OpenStack has had over the past four years.

As of May 2014, OpenStack boasts of 16,266 individual members in 139 countries from 355 organizations and has 2,130 contributors, 466 average monthly contributors and 17,209 patches merged. Compared to last year, OpenStack’s individual members have almost doubled in number, while contributors have more than doubled.

Enterprise interest in OpenStack has also grown, as indicated by the program’s Atlanta Summit earlier this year, packed with more than 4,500 attendees from 55 countries.

Voccio stated that one of OpenStack’s goals in the past year was to “close the feedback loop between operators and developers” as “operators can tell us what works and what works at scale.”  To foster this, OpenStack launched DefCore, a set of standards and tests that will help the community understand which projects are stable, widely used and key to interoperability, earlier this year.

“I’m as optimistic about OpenStack’s future as I am humbled and inspired by its growth. It’s truly a project that we – the community– have taken from a handful of lines of code to a production-ready cloud operating system that world-beating enterprises use and trust,” Voccio stated.

He expects OpenStack’s fifth year to be a big one, but before that, let’s take a look back at the many developments of the past four years, as well as the expectations that the cooperative should address in the next year and beyond.

OpenStack Milestones

 

2010

July 19 – OpenStack launched with source code from NASA and Rackspace and suport from 25 participating organizations

August 30 – OpenStack launched iPad app based on Rackspace Cloud Pro

October 21 – OpenStack Austin Code was released

October 22 – Microsoft joined OpenStack community and adds Hyper-V support to OpenStack

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2011

January 18 – Internap launched Storage Service using OpenStack

February 3 – OpenStack Bexxar Code was released; Citrix adds support for VMware hypervisor; Cisco joins OpenStack community

March 8 – Rackspace announced OpenStack services with Rackspace Cloud Builders

March 31 – Rackspace, Dell and Equinix launched the OpenStack Demo Environment

April 7 – Facebook launched Open Compute

April 12 – VMware launched Open Source PaaS Cloud Foundry

April 15 – OpenStack Cactus Code was released

May 10 – Canonical announced support for OpenStack in Ubuntu distribution

May 25 – Citrix announced ‘Project Olympus’ OpenStack distribution

July 14 – SecureStore uses OpenStack for Cloud Storage Service

September 29 – OpenStack Diablo Code was released

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2012

April 5 – OpenStack Essex Code was released, adds 150 features including Compute, Object Storage, Dashboard, Identity, and Image Service.

September – OpenStack Foundation was officially launched

September 27 – OpenStack Folsom Code was released, adds 185 new features across compute, storage and networking.

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2013

April 4 – OpenStack Grizzly Code was released, adds nearly 230 new features across compute, storage, networking and shared services in the cloud platform.

October 17 – OpenStack Havana Code was released, adds 400 plus new features across compute, storage, networking and cross-platform services.

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2014

April 17 – OpenStack Icehouse code was released, over 350 new features added including the OpenStack Database Service which was incubated during the Havan release cycle.

May 12 – OpenStack Marketplace launched with five initial categories: public cloud services, distributions and appliances, consulting and system integration and drivers, with offers from the likes of HP, IBM ,Red Hat, Nebula and Mirantis.

June – Rackspace unveiled OnMetal OpenStack-based cloud servers

Obstacles and expectations

 

OpenStack may be looking at a bright future ahead, but there are still things it needs to address in order to secure such a promising future.

theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s roving broadcast studio, was present at the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta last May where the hosts, John Furrier and Stu Miniman, got to chat with customers and contributors for OpenStack. The hosts noticed that the event focused on OpenStack’s momentum, such as the increasing number of contributors and vendors getting involved with the open source ecosystem, but no big announcement or launches were made.

Furrier noted in a Day 2 Wrap-up segment that OpenStack is still facing obstacles and  could “go off the rails,” if tugged in too many different directions: “weird agendas, getting forked,” said the host.

“What are these big guys going to do? Chip away at the momentum to pull it back onto their terms?” Furrier added.

• Does OpenStack need containers to succeed? 

Other questions that surfaced during the event was whether containers are needed for OpenStack to gain traction, and whether Rackspace was trying to put a leash on OpenStack.

During the summit, one CrowdChat thread touched on the importance of OpenStack focusing on making containers first-class citizens of the ecosystem, which got a response from theCUBE alumnus Rich Miller who said, “I would make a strong statement. Without acknowledgment and real leadership in embracing containers, OpenStack will fail to gain traction.”

OpenShift Community Manager for Red Hat, Diane Mueller, expects that the community itself will make containers a first-class citizen.

• Rackspace control

As mentioned earlier, OpenStack was launched using codes from both Rackspace and NASA.  Despite being open source, some have accused Rackspace of controlling OpenStack too tightly, which led to what some believe is the reason Rackspace’s presence in the community has decreased.

In an interview with Rackspace CTO John Engates, he was asked to comment on these accusations, to which he responded that the company is not walking away from OpenStack and added that “this wouldn’t be a strong community today if we had tried to smother it and hold it for ourselves.”

See the entire Day 2 wrap segment from this year’s OpenStack Summit below:

source: http://www.rackspace.co.uk/innovation/cloud-resources/openstack-infographic

photo credit: opensourceway via photopin cc