OpenStack is an IaaS

IAAS

IAAS can refer to the following:*Incorporated Association of Architects and Surveyors, British professional body renamed 1993 as the Association of Building Engineers* Institute of Agriculture and Animal Science, institute of Tribhuvan University, Nepal...

 cloud computing

Cloud computing

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility over a network ....

 project by Rackspace Cloud and NASA

NASA

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research...

. Currently more than 120 companies have joined the project among which are Citrix Systems

Citrix Systems

Citrix Systems, Inc. is a multinational corporation founded in 1989, that provides server and desktop virtualization, networking, software-as-a-service , and cloud computing technologies, including Xen open source products....

, Dell

Dell

Dell, Inc. is an American multinational information technology corporation based in 1 Dell Way, Round Rock, Texas, United States, that develops, sells and supports computers and related products and services. Bearing the name of its founder, Michael Dell, the company is one of the largest...

, AMD

Advanced Micro Devices

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. or AMD is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Sunnyvale, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for commercial and consumer markets...

, Intel

Intel Corporation

Intel Corporation is an American multinational semiconductor chip maker corporation headquartered in Santa Clara, California, United States and the world's largest semiconductor chip maker, based on revenue. It is the inventor of the x86 series of microprocessors, the processors found in most...

, Canonical

Canonical

Canonical is an adjective derived from canon. Canon comes from the greek word κανών kanon, "rule" or "measuring stick" , and is used in various meanings....

, SUSE Linux, HP

Hewlett-Packard

Hewlett-Packard Company or HP is an American multinational information technology corporation headquartered in Palo Alto, California, USA that provides products, technologies, softwares, solutions and services to consumers, small- and medium-sized businesses and large enterprises, including...

, and Cisco

Cisco

Cisco may refer to:Companies:*Cisco Systems, a computer networking company* Certis CISCO, corporatised entity of the former Commercial and Industrial Security Corporation in Singapore...

. It is free

Free software

Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...

 open source

Open source

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

 software released under the terms of the Apache License

Apache License

The Apache License is a copyfree free software license authored by the Apache Software Foundation . The Apache License requires preservation of the copyright notice and disclaimer....

.

OpenStack integrates code from NASA's Nebula

Nebula (computing platform)

Nebula is a Federal cloud computing pilot under development at NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California.The project began in 2008 under the direction of Chris C...

 platform as well as Rackspace's Cloud Files platform.

History

In July 2010, Rackspace Hosting

Rackspace

Rackspace US, Inc. is an IT hosting company based in San Antonio, Texas. The company also has offices in Australia, the United Kingdom, The Netherlands and Hong Kong, and data centers operating in Texas, Illinois, Virginia, the United Kingdom, and Hong Kong in late 2008...

 and NASA jointly launched a new open source cloud initiative known as OpenStack. The mission of the OpenStack project is to enable any organization to create and offer cloud computing services running on standard hardware. The community's first official release, code-named Austin, was made available just 4 months later with plans to release regular updates of the software every few months.

Release history

Release name	Release date	Notes
Austin	21 October 2010
Bexar	3 February 2011
Cactus	15 April 2011
Diablo	22 September 2011

Components

OpenStack has a modular architecture that encompasses three components:

• Compute (Nova)
• Object Storage (Swift)
• Image Service (Glance)

Compute (Nova)

OpenStack Compute (Nova) is a cloud computing fabric controller (the main part of an IaaS system). It is written in Python

Python (programming language)

Python is a general-purpose, high-level programming language whose design philosophy emphasizes code readability. Python claims to "[combine] remarkable power with very clear syntax", and its standard library is large and comprehensive...

 and utilizes many external libraries such as Eventlet (for concurrent programming), Kombu (for AMQP

Advanced Message Queuing Protocol

The Advanced Message Queuing Protocol is an open standard application layer protocol for message-oriented middleware. The defining features of AMQP are message orientation, queuing, routing , reliability and security.AMQP mandates the behaviour of the messaging provider and client to the extent...

 communication), and SQLAlchemy

SQLAlchemy

SQLAlchemy is an open source SQL toolkit and object-relational mapper for the Python programming language released under the MIT License.SQLAlchemy provides "a full suite of well known enterprise-level persistence patterns, designed for efficient and high-performing database access, adapted into a...

 (for database access).

Object Storage (Swift)

OpenStack Object Store (Swift) is a massively scalable redundant storage system leveraged in cloud solutions.

Users

Some of the prominent users include:

• NASA
  NASA
  The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research...
  
  
• Rackspace Cloud
• HP Public Cloud – runs a variant of Ubuntu Linux
• MercadoLibre.com
  MercadoLibre.com
  MercadoLibre.com or MercadoLivre in Portuguese is a website dedicated to e-commerce and online auctions. It is eBay's Latin American partner. MercadoLibre is Latin America's number-one e-commerce site...
  
   – MercadoLibre has over 6,000 nodes managed by OpenStack

See also

• Cloud.com
  Cloud.com
  Cloud.com is a venture-backed startup based out of Cupertino that develops an open source cloud orchestration software product for the implementation of public and private cloud computing environments. Their software, CloudStack, is designed to make it easier for Service Providers and Enterprises...
  
  
• Cloud computing comparison
  Cloud computing comparison
  -General information:-Supported Hosts:-Features:...
  
  
• Eucalyptus
  Eucalyptus (computing)
  Eucalyptus is a software platform for the implementation of private cloud computing on computer clusters. There is an open-core enterprise edition and an open-source edition. Currently, it exports a user-facing interface that is compatible with the Amazon EC2 and S3 services but the platform is...
  
  
• OpenNebula
  OpenNebula
  OpenNebula is an open-source cloud computing toolkit for managing heterogeneous distributed data center infrastructures. The OpenNebula toolkit manages a data center's virtual infrastructure to build private, public and hybrid IaaS clouds...
  
  
• Nimbus
  Nimbus (cloud computing)
  Nimbus is an open-source toolkit that, once installed on a cluster, provides an infrastructure as a Service cloud to its client via WSRF-based or Amazon EC2 WSDL web service APIs....
  
  

External links

• OpenStack Official website
  • http://openstack.org/projects/compute/
  • http://openstack.org/projects/storage/
  • http://openstack.org/projects/image-service/
  • http://wiki.openstack.org/
  • http://hudson.openstack.org/
• https://launchpad.net/openstack/
  • Nova on Launchpad
    Launchpad
    A launch pad is the area and facilities where rockets or spacecraft take off.Launch pad may also refer to:-Computing:* Launchpad , website used for bug tracking and software development mainly used as part of the Ubuntu operating system...
    
    
  • Swift on Launchpad
    Launchpad
    A launch pad is the area and facilities where rockets or spacecraft take off.Launch pad may also refer to:-Computing:* Launchpad , website used for bug tracking and software development mainly used as part of the Ubuntu operating system...
    
    
  • Glance on Launchpad
    Launchpad
    A launch pad is the area and facilities where rockets or spacecraft take off.Launch pad may also refer to:-Computing:* Launchpad , website used for bug tracking and software development mainly used as part of the Ubuntu operating system...
    
    
• [irc://irc.freenode.nte/openstack #openstack] on freenode
  Freenode
  freenode, formerly known as Open Projects Network, is an IRC network used to discuss peer-directed projects. Their servers are all accessible from the domain name [irc://chat.freenode.net chat.freenode.net], which load balances connections by using the actual servers in rotation...
  
  

Documentation

• http://nova.openstack.org/
• http://swift.openstack.org/
• http://glance.openstack.org/
• http://docs.openstack.org/