Happy First Birthday, OpenStack

OpenStack turns one today, and some 350 supporters from all over Europe--including Hungary, Norway, France, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, and more--recently celebrated the occasion at EMEA OpenStack Day in London.

According to Lauren Sell, who runs PR for OpenStack, the meeting was something of a voyage of discovery. "Since it's an open source project, we never know who exactly is deploying the code, unless they are also Rackspace customers, or have been vocal in the community," she says. "At the event, we were able to meet organizations like Eduserv, a non-profit that is using OpenStack to deliver cloud infrastructure to universities in the UK."

One of the panel discussions at the event covered emerging OpenStack distributions, and included participation by Citrix--which announced its OpenStack-compatible Project Olympus in May--Canonical, which announced they would support OpenStack in the October UEC release, and Stackops, a startup from Madrid, who Sell says has already has 3,000 installations of their OpenStack distro product. Another session at the gathering discussed the OpenStack ecosystem, and featured representatives from Dell, Equinix, Citrix and RightScale.

With more than 50 companies signed up during its first year, OpenStack is only going to gain more popularity and power across the cloud community. Rackspace is clearly dedicated to making the technology as user-friendly as possible, and has indicated that it will do whatever is possible to make this project a big success.

As long as all the members leave their egos and marketing plans at the door, OpenStack is on its way to great things.

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 07/19/2011 at 12:48 PM