Dreamhost CEO Simon Anderson

After two years of testing with a select group of customers, DreamHost is finally ready to make its OpenStack-based cloud available to the broader public – but it’s still officially in beta with no time frame for launch. This presumably means there are still some hiccups to work out with the service, but that shouldn’t be too big of an issue for the audience that the New Dream Network, LLC subsidiary is targeting.

DreamCompute, as the new offering is known, is positioned as something more akin to Amazon Web Services in terms of accessibility and pricing than other OpenStack-based services such as Hewlett-Packard Co.’s recently expanded Helion platform. That strategic decision reflects the fact that DreamHost is not trying to court rise-averse CIOs but rather open-source-loving developers, who, up until now, haven’t had many options for getting their hands on the next big thing in cloud computing without buying their own hardware.

To be more specific, they only had one: a community initiative called TryStack operated by 10 of the more active corporate contributors to the project, including HP, rivaling OpenStack cloud operator Rackspace Inc. and a number of other big names from the ecosystem. Unlike DreamCompute, the service is free, but it also has a catch: developers have to apply for access, which comes with the very real chance of rejection and – worse – all data is periodically wiped clean to ensure fair use. The downside of that policy is that it only makes TryStack suited for running fairly trivial OpenStack experiments.

DreamCompute, in contrast, can accommodate more serious projects while still maintaining an emphasis on the particular needs of the development community. In that spirit, DreamHost has taken its offering a step further than merely using OpenStack to power the underlying infrastructure, providing full access to the core services of the project including the compute, networking and storage interfaces as well as the identity and image management components.

Users can fire up virtual servers on DreamCompute in as little as 40 seconds – on par with AWS – thanks to a copy-on-write architecture not unlike that used by Docker that provisions local copies of system files when they’re first modified rather than immediately upon launch. Moreover, each instance comes with its own dedicated virtual switch that effectively isolates it from the rest of the environment.

This is made possible by a homegrown technology called Akanda that DreamHost apparently developed as a replacement for the software-defined networking solution from Nicira Inc. that the platform was originally based upon. VMware Inc.’s acquisition of the firm was probably one of the main motivations behind the switch given how prominently the open-source foundation of DreamCompute is featured. Continuing that theme, the storage component backing the service is Ceph, another open-source project that got its start at DreamHost before its core developers were spun off into a startup that was sold to Red Hat Inc. for $175 million earlier this year.

The launch of DreamCompute is significant not only because it manages to carve out a uniquely niche for itself in what what has become an incredibly crowded market but also because it makes OpenStack a lot more accessible to developers than it was before. That potentially paves the way for the creation of more next-generation applications that can truly harness the capabilities of the project, which the head of the OpenStack Foundation admitted in a recent interview on SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE are currently few and far between.