OpenStack Foundation Nears Launch

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The OpenStack Foundation is almost officially alive. The open source group that will have oversight over the OpenStack cloud platform project was first announced nearly a year ago and is now ready to launch.

The Board of the new Foundation had its first full meeting at the CloudOpen Summit in San Diego last week. In an interview with Datamation, Jonathan Bryce one of the founders of the OpenStack effort at Rackspace detailed the road ahead.

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“We’re arriving at the point where we’re about to launch the Foundation and it’s going to take OpenStack off into the future,” Bryce said.

Currently Bryce’s official title is Acting Secretary of the interim board of the OpenStack Foundation. When the Foundation is officially launched, Bryce will become the Executive Director.

The official public launch for OpenStack will occur in mid-September, a month prior to the next OpenStack Summit event in October. OpenStack is also expected to push out its next major release, codenamed Folsom at the October event. OpenStack was originally started by NASA and Rackspace in July of 2010. The effort has grown dramatically in the last two years and supporters now include HP, IBM, Dell, Cisco, AT&T and Red Hat among other tech vendors.

The addition of mature technology organizations has a positive impact on OpenStack’s development process. Bryce noted those organization have helped to form stable release teams to keep things moving forward. He stressed that even though effort has been spent on creating the organization, that effort has not slowed technology development in the OpenStack project.

Folsom

In the upcoming Folsom release, the Quantum networking project will become a core project. Quantum is an effort originally started by Nicira, a company that VMware acquired earlier this year for $1.2 billion.

The other new piece is the block storage project called Cinder.

“Cinder was part of the Nova Compute project originally, but there have been a lot of teams from NetApp and other companies that have been getting involved in the block storage capabilities of OpenStack,” Bryce said. “So it was something that made sense to split out and give it a focused team as well.”

Migration Path

With the upcoming Folsom release, users of the current OpenStack Essex release will face of the prospect of migration. There are other efforts including Dell Crowbar that can help with installation, though Bryce doesn’t see Crowbar as being part of the default OpenStack project.

“There are quite a few people that use that (crowbar) to get OpenStack onto their systems and manage it,” Bryce said.

Aside from Dell, Linux vendor SUSE has also embraced Crowbar for OpenStack installation. Crowbar is a suplementary effort and not part of the core focus for OpenStack.

“The core of OpenStack is really focused on Infrastructure as a Service,” Bryce said.

Beyond Folsom

Over the last two years, the OpenStack project has evolved rapidly. Bryce expects that after the Folsom release, the rate of change will slow down, which will be a good thing for users.

“We’ve got a lot of the big stuff in place and at this point we can start to make improvements instead of large changes and additions,” Bryce said.

Moving forward, Bryce sees OpenStack with a solid core of software that will keep expanding in terms of use cases. There is also more awareness of users and their needs which will also help to move the effort forward.

“Hopefully we’re going to have things that are really important to users, but that doesn’t mean that there will be a new project every release,” Bryce said.

Watch the full video below:

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.