Last night, timed with the opening day of OSCON, hosting and managed service provider Rackspace, along with NASA and other organizations, launched the OpenStack project.  The project aims to create and foster a 100%, Apache 2.0 license backed, Cloud Computing stack that can be used by all.

It did not take too long for the news to spread around blogs and twitter, and from the responses people are having it is seeming as if the Cloud Computing landscape has completely changed over night. 

“NO MORE LOCK-IN” is the chant around the web..

It’s definitely the PR focal point of the announcement.  On the surface, and in the short-term, what we have is yet another choice for an IaaS platform, and out of the gate it has a couple good size backers in NASA and of course Rackspace.

Cloud admin panel heavyweight RightScale chimed in with their thoughts on what this announcements means to the marketplace.  They of course are participating in the effort, and will be adding support for OpenStack to their service.

If we do a quick count of IaaS in-a-box solutions, we have OpenStack, Enomaly, newly launched Nimbula, Open Nebula, Cloud.com, 3Tera/CA, soon to be MS Azure and VMWare Redwood (or whatever it ends up being called), and of course early leader from a public perception in Eucalyptus.

Eucalyptus seems to stand most to lose from this move, who delivers their own open source IaaS product, including a paid version which supports VMWare’s hypervisor, as well as some other more advanced features.  It was quite interesting this morning to reading a bunch of comments on twitter.  Maybe I am a little out of touch with the implementers on the front-lines, but I have only heard positive things about Eucalyptus and their solutions, and all of a sudden people are talking about closed they are, and how OpenStack will enable people to avoid "closed open source" solutions such as theirs.

Ultimately I believe that this is such young, potentially gigantic and vibrant space that there will be room for many vendors.  How many is yet to be seen.  The $20 million that Eucalyptus raised, combined with their early lead of the gate should help them maintain momentum through the end of the year when the OpenStack solution fully hits the market.

The move is, of course, genius for Rackspace. 

As they continue to try and grow mind-share around their services, they are saying to the market that we will win by providing the best service.  Of course it does not hurt that if a customer gets pissed off at them, and is using their cloud files/servers products, they will soon have the option to download a copy of the software that powers it, and run their setup on-premise, or with another provider who as adopted the stack.

What OpenStack provides on the surface is fantastic, but it will take a lot more then free software to truly break the cloud lock-in scenarios.  The fact that one will be able to take a copy of the stack and run it internally does not offer that much value up front.  Down the line however, if you have Rackspace, and many other providers running the same stacks, and a level of interoperability is created across federated OpenStack implementations, then things will get really interesting.  A world where you can "easily" push your workloads at the provider level around becomes very powerful to the consumers of cloud services.

Of course again Rackspace stands to win the most out of this.  If they can execute on the federated cloud model, they will not only be giving potential customers a great package to use as an internal beta implementation tool, but also be able to use it as a lure to acquire more cloud workload over time.

I cannot wait until later this year when OpenStack his its first major release milestone, timed sometime around when VMWare releases their IaaS in-a-box platform, and Microsoft Azure in-a-box starts to show up in the marketplace.

[Editor’s Note: Photo credits to Marc Canter. –mrh]