OpenStack Offers One-Stop Shop for Cloud Resources

The OpenStack Foundation this week unveiled a one-stop shop for organizations interested in learning about and getting started with the free, open source software for building clouds.

The OpenStack Marketplace opened Monday during the OpenStack Summit conference in Atlanta, featuring vendor offerings in Public Clouds; Distributions and Appliances; Training; Consulting and Systems Integrators; and Drivers.

Within those categories, users can explore products and services that best suit their business requirements.

For example, under the Public Clouds category, a Google-powered map shows the number of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings available in different regions of the world, accompanied by a list of vendors, such as HP, Rackspace, Internap and several more. Each listing contains a capsule description of the cloud service with a link to explore more details, including OpenStack services offered and their respective versions -- such as Havana -- along with pricing options, supported hypervisors and OSes, data center locations, API coverage and more.

Under the Training tab, actually in operation since last September, more than 250 classes have been listed. Summaries of training opportunities are provided, along with upcoming dates of courses, locations, the level of instruction and more. A separate section shows a consolidated list of upcoming classes.

Marketplace users have the option to read and submit reviews of the services.

The foundation said all featured vendors are vetted to ensure they meet technical requirements and are transparent about information such as the OpenStack versions supported and the capabilities of their services.

A key part of its mission, the foundation said, is to inform users about the growing OpenStack ecosystem and "cut through the noise" to give users facts and help them make decisions about services to use.

"How to get started with OpenStack is one of the most common questions we receive," said Mark Collier, chief operating officer of the OpenStack Foundation, in a statement. "The answer is that there are many ways to consume OpenStack, whether they are building a cloud, looking to use one by the hour or pursuing a hybrid model. The marketplace is intended to help users make sense of the paths to adoption and find the right mix of products, services and community resources to achieve their goals."

The foundation said it's enacting testing requirements to validate OpenStack technical capabilities and later this year will publish test results on the marketplace.

OpenStack, operating under Apache License 2.0, features many related projects for controlling pools of processing, storage and networking resources in a data center, managed through a dashboard, command-line tools or a RESTful API. It seeks to help organizations quickly launch new products, add features and improve systems internally with open products and services, avoiding technology lock-in. The foundation has more than 16,000 individual members and some 350 organizations supporting it in 138 countries.

It operates with a six-month release cycle that includes frequent development milestones. Icehouse, the most recent stable release, was made available April 17.

Vendors interested in being featured in the marketplace were invited to check out the branding programs.

Posted by David Ramel on 05/14/2014 at 9:44 AM