The race to cloud dominance took a detour to Vancouver this week for the sixth bi-annual OpenStack Summit, where vendors from around the ecosystem showed off their latest wares to try and woo the enterprise technology buyers in attendance. The spotlight was divided among three main groups led by the guests of honor: the distributors.

Drawing a crowd

Mirantis Inc., the self-proclaimed leader of the pack thanks to more customers running in production than any of its rivals, kicked off the event with the debut of a new certification program aimed at encouraging partners to support for its version of OpenStack. The plan worked, with several major vendors having announced their participation in the program immediately upon launch.

That aggressive effort to expand interoperability with third party technologies is meant to help Mirantis set itself apart from competitors such as Bright Computing Inc., which became the newest distributor in the OpenStack ecosystem on the very morning of the certification program’s debut. The platform combines the cloud platform with its homegrown management automation software, the same integrated approach that Red Hat Inc. is going for.

More than one breed of distributor

The Linux powerhouse followed up the news from Mirantis and Bright with the introduction of a new cloud bundle that couples its own version of OpenStack, which packs a flavor of the operating system built-in, with management and development capabilities. The combined package promises to provide a unified platform for running multi-tenant applications across on- and off-premise infrastructure.

To top it off, Red Hat also released a file system to complement the platform, but it wasn’t the only Linux distributor that made headlines at OpenStack Summit. Arch-rival Canonical Ltd. also managed to create some waves in the ecosystem on the back of a new support service that offers to provide organizations with help setting up and maintaining the storage component of their implementations.

A different kind of service

Cloud providers also got their share of the spotlight at OpenStack Summit, with much of it going to IBM, which launched its hosted implementation into general availability to address the growing number of hybrid applications that companies are writing for the cloud platform. The company promises to support such workloads with comparable security as behind the firewall, the same pitch that Appcito Inc. is touting for its own service.

The startup launched its Cloud Application Front-End the day after IBM’s announcement with the promise of removing the hassle involved in trying to manually secure an OpenStack cluster. To that end, the toolkit provides load balancing capabilities, application-level protection mechanisms and analytic functionality to help administrators keep an eye on the activity in the environment.
Photo by Kenny Louie via Flickr