OpenStack Foundation Launches Giving Voice to Users

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OpenStack, the open source cloud stack platform, now officially has an open governance model and organizational structure. The OpenStack Foundation was formally launched today as a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing OpenStack technology and usage.

Efforts to turn OpenStack into a Foundation first began in October of 2011. Since then, large vendors including IBM, HP, Dell, Cisco, Red Hat, Canonical, Brocade and AT&T have signed on to become founding members of the new Foundation.

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Canonical, the lead sponsor behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, was among the first Linux vendors to embrace OpenStack. With the official formation of the OpenStack Foundation today, Kyle MacDonald, VP of Cloud at Canonical, told Datamation that his company completely endorses and supports the OpenStack Foundation launch and the organization of the foundation. MacDonald now sits on the Board of the OpenStack Foundation.

“The mission of the foundation, and the great support the foundation has, cements its place as the de facto Cloud solution in the industry,” MacDonald said.

Part of the success of OpenStack to date has been its broad appeal beyond just open source operating system vendors. One such vendor is networking firm Brocade, which has been participating in OpenStack since 2011 and is now a corporate sponsor of the OpenStack Foundation.

“We believe in supporting open and flexible tools that companies need for their cloud operations,” Keith Stewart, senior director product management at Brocade told Datamation. “Brocade has a rich heritage of networking innovations and by being involved with OpenStack, we look forward to helping accelerate the evolution toward robust, cloud-based solutions through contributing to that open source community.

Users

While the new OpenStack Foundation provides a model for participating vendor organizations to contribute, it also includes a model for user participation.

Among the users that now has representation in the new OpenStack Foundation is CERN.

“CERN’s business is fundamental physics, finding out what the universe is made of and how it works,” Tim Bell, group leader of the OIS group at CERN told Datamation. “We are moving towards a large scale Infrastructure as a Service cloud based on OpenStack with up to 15,000 servers to analyze the 25PB of data a year from the Large Hadron Collider.”

Bell noted that OpenStack is maturing rapidly, both in terms of functionality and stability.

“As the user community gains more experience of production usage, we need to close the feedback loop with the developers to identify areas which can be improved further,” Bell said. “The user committee provides a forum to gather and prioritizes these requirements from enterprise, academic and service provider users along with the 38 user groups throughout the world.”

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.