OpenStack Summit is in full swing in Portland, Oregon this week.  Launched in 2010 by Rackspace and NASA, OpenStack is all about providing cloud computing to everyone, but how it has become one of the top choices for public and private sectors in cloud computing?

Collaboration with spacemen

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OpenStack is the product of the collaboration between Rackspace Hosting and NASA, launched in July 2010.  The initiative was started to enable any organization to create and offer cloud computing services running on standard hardware.  Rackspace was looking for a scalable technology on which to base its cloud offering, but what was currently available in the market – Amazon’s proprietary public cloud and VMware’s virtualization solutions – were deemed too minimal to meet Rackspace’s needs.

Before OpenStack came to fruition, Rackspace came up with rCloud, extending simple and attainable goals such as releasing its cloud software as an open source project, running the open source stack in production, and dedicating resources like developers, code and marketing.

When rCloud was released, NASA was also working on its own project.  This led to Rackspace Senior Vice President and General Manager Jim Curry reaching out to Chris Kemp, then at NASA, now CEO of Nebula, for a possible collaboration.

“I run corporate development at Rackspace, and am very interested in talking with your team about Nebula,” Curry wrote in an e-mail to Kemp.  “Confidentially, we are in the process of open sourcing our cloud stack and I am interested in seeing if there might be some synergies/opportunities for the two projects to work together. Would it be possible to setup some time to discuss with your team?”

From there, OpenStack took its form.  Rackspace already had Swift, a highly available, distributed, eventually consistent object/blob store code running in production and NASA was working on something similar.  Since Swift was already working well, NASA took the code.  NASA was working on Nova, which enables enterprises and service providers to offer on-demand computing resources, by provisioning and managing large networks of virtual machines, and Rackspace was working on the same things, but NASA’s looked better so Rackspace used them instead of making their own.

OpenStack’s roots are based on a collaborative process, part of which is being able to recognize others’ superior code.  If Rackspace and NASA hadn’t had that mutual respect, then OpenStack may still be a dream today.

What’s in a name?

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If you have kids or even a pet, you know that picking a name can be hard.  And the same goes for OpenStack.  Curry or Kemp spent many nights working on the name before they eventually came up with OpenStack – simple, yet has that certain “umpf” to it.

Some of the name choices were: Sangria, CodeRed, CloudOS, Cloudbase, Cloudcontrol, Cloudware, CloudCommander and CloudManager.

A little competition

Right off the bat, OpenStack went head-to-head with Amazon Web Services, and things are only heating up, now that Rackspace has cloned OpenStack to offer its own version of AWS.  Think of it like the Apple-Google mobile operating software war.  iOS and AWS have a more exclusive feel to it while OpenStack and Android entice the community with their open source offerings.

Though OpenStack had its early supporters, about 150 companies such as  AMD, Intel, Canonical, SUSE Linux, Inktank, Red Hat, Groupe Bull, Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM, NEC, VMware and Yahoo!, Amazon believed that there were not many takers for what Rackspace had to offer.  Also, Adam Selipsky, vice president of product marketing, sales, and product management at AWS, stated that “AWS is open and customers can import and export virtual machines and data freely,” so what OpenStack is offering isn’t really something new.  Another blow to Rackspace was when NASA moved parts of its infrastructure to AWS to save a million dollars a year.

Though OpenStack has hit some bumps, it has accomplished a great deal in just under three years of existence.  Check out the infographic below, OpenStack Downloaded Over 300,000 Times, Powers On, for more OpenStack milestones.