If you didn’t see it already, OpenStack announced its launch as an independent foundation dedicated to the care and feeding of its open source cloud operating system today, sloughing off its corporate skin and officially separating itself from one of its original founders (and some say, overly influential), Rackspace.
This is great news for OpenStack because it makes their commitment to an end-to-end open source model clear. All of the code for OpenStack is freely available under the Apache 2.0 license. Anyone can run it, build on it or submit changes back to the project. The trademark is now owned by the OpenStack Foundation, and the governance board looks to be transitioning towards a more diverse collection of advisors.
Internap was one of the first service providers to throw its support behind OpenStack because we saw that it could offer our customers a strong, open-source alternative to the proprietary cloud architectures that currently hold the lion’s share of the cloud OS market. Of course this support goes well beyond just selling our customers cloud services based on the OpenStack platform or being an OpenStack corporate sponsor. Our engineers have been active contributors to the Diablo, Essex and the upcoming Folsom releases (particularly with respect to networking and back office functions) to make OpenStack a better service across the board. In fact, of the over 100 companies that contributed to Essex, Internap ranked:
- 9th in “Employers with the most hackers”
- 10th in “Top reviewers by employer”
- 7th in “Top reviewers by employer” and “Top bugs fixed by employer” for Quantum (Networking)
- 6th in “Top lines changed by employer” and “Top bugs fixed by employer” for Swift (Storage)
- 5th in “Employers with the most hackers” for Swift
- 8th in “Top reviewers by employer” for Nova (Compute)
- 16th in “Top lines changed by employer” for Glance (Images)
In addition to the company contributions, several current Internap employees also made outstanding individual contributions:
- Armando Migliaccio was 2nd in “Developers with the most changed lines” for Nova and 6th for “Developers with the most changed lines” across all OpenStack projects
- Maru Newby was elected as a core developer for Quantum in recognition of his work on the project
As you can see, we clearly believe that investing in OpenStack is worthwhile. With transparency, independence and a robust community of like-minded developers, we expect that cloud services based on OpenStack can yield lower end-user cost, feature richness and great performance (we REALLY care about this one for it managed services ). 🙂
