What a great move by rackspace.<p>That's very impressive, they're essentially risking enabling their competition by doing this and still they've done it.<p>This actually will allow the development of 'micro clouds', a thing I wrote about a while back because I don't like the centralization issues of clouds for a number of reasons and use cases.<p><a href="http://jacquesmattheij.com/node/37" rel="nofollow">http://jacquesmattheij.com/node/37</a><p>Getting rid of vendor lock-in is also fantastic.
I'm a developer on swift (OpenStack storage == Rackspace Cloud Files). We've been pretty excited about opening this, and I'd love to answer any questions you have.<p>Swift documentation is at <a href="http://swift.openstack.org" rel="nofollow">http://swift.openstack.org</a>. Check out the "SAIO - Swift All In One" page to see how to set up a VM to run it. With some very small tweaks, you can also run it on a single slice (mount a loopback device rather than another virtual drive).<p>Although I don't know as much about it, the compute docs are at <a href="http://nova.openstack.org" rel="nofollow">http://nova.openstack.org</a>
It's open, it's cloud, it's new, it's got NASA involved! So how does this help me move 20 terrabytes of data and a range of web services and customer facing applications from my current cloud provider to a new provider?<p>The theory is that I can take a data snapshot of my 20 terabytes, move it to the new provider's network by driving it across town (still the fastest way to move data), "drop it in", switch over DNS and excluding a few lost transactions during switch-over everything should work fine.<p>The reality is that this removes the pain of proprietary configuration from a data center migration but it's still a painful process to switch cloud providers that involves a lot of work, some risk and down-time. So while this is a great marketing play from Rackspace there is still a level of lock-in when you commit to using a provider and so the risk to Rackspace to go 'open' is minimal but the benefits of being the leader are huge.
I'm sad RackSpace chose to market this effort under the term "Open Stack".<p>A number of us in the open web community have used that term to a great extent to talk about OpenID + OAuth + Portable Contacts + Open Social (<a href="http://therealmccrea.com/2008/09/19/joseph-smarr-at-web-20-on-the-new-open-stack/" rel="nofollow">http://therealmccrea.com/2008/09/19/joseph-smarr-at-web-20-o...</a>)<p>Admittedly the initiative has lost momentum (for many reasons and factors) but things are still out there. This just creates confusion and branding collision.<p>I notice RackSpace is pushing a "TM" on their OpenStack branding, which calls into issue anyone using the term for it's prior and original meaning.
I attended the design summit, and I believe this is going to be a really big deal.<p>Whether it's a big hosting company running a public cloud, a corporate running a private cloud, or a smaller dev/test cloud, they can now all run the same free software stack, and software can move freely between those environments. It's clear this announcement will have ripple effects throughout the entire cloud ecosystem. I hope the project will also boost adoption of cloud-style infrastructures, now that the fear of supplier lock-in is removed.
Rackspace had a design summit last week in Austin, TX for Openstack. I was an attendee and learned quite a bit from the folks at Rackspace. They've built and re-built their infrastructure enough times they know what they need to look out for. The drop-and-swap component model is great too.<p>It was fantastic to see what they've put together and the business model is great. Commoditizing architecture and software really is the next step.<p>If anyone is interested, I could write up a blog post about my experience, maybe provide a little more insight into the buy-in.
Personally, I find the OpenStack Object Storage component more interesting than OpenStack Compute. I like the idea and implementation of S3 for saving important data. Similarly, the same sort of lazy replication of EBS just makes life easier.<p>I think that there will be a real sweet spot for smaller organizations who would like an internal system like S3 that offers robust data security with using really cheap disk drives and servers.<p>Hopefully OpenStack Object Storage will have good support for multi-datacenter replication.
Okay I don't know much about Cloud Computing but can anyone tell how is going to help someone like me who has one or two blogs with some web hosting company.<p>Or should someone like me even care?
While I'm running on AWS I strongly support a push for interoperability and freedom from lockin. We'll just have to see what kind of adoption this project gets.
Does anyone know how this compares with Eucalyptus <a href="http://open.eucalyptus.com/" rel="nofollow">http://open.eucalyptus.com/</a> that's the core of Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud <a href="http://www.ubuntu.com/cloud/private" rel="nofollow">http://www.ubuntu.com/cloud/private</a> ?
In April, NASA's Nebula project was based on Eucalyptus<p><a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/28/nebula_goes_to_goddard/" rel="nofollow">http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/28/nebula_goes_to_godda...</a><p>Does this mean they are completely moving away Eucalyptus?
Adding the TC synopsis of the project posted in another thread for continuity.
<a href="http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/18/openstack-org-rackspace-open-sources-their-cloud-services-platform-and-gets-nasa-on-board/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/18/openstack-org-rackspace-ope...</a>
Yay. A marginally competent hosting company just released the code to their mostly unsuccessful cloud! This is like IBM open sourcing OS/2 a year after they admitted defeat to Microsoft in the desktop operating system market.