Foundation to be Formed to Shepherd OpenStack

The OpenStack Conference 2011 convened in Boston this week, drawing companies and individuals who are working to establish industry standards for open source cloud software. Today, the community will move forward organizationally as Lew Moorman, President, Rackspace Cloud and Chief Strategy Officer, will discuss Rackspace’s intention to start an independent OpenStack Foundation in 2012. According to an OpenStack blog post, the aim of the foundation will be project governance and oversight of the OpenStack trademark. Conference attendees are invited to a Town Hall session to offer feedback on the process.

Last July, managed hosting and cloud provider Rackspace, along with NASA and about 20 other companies, launched OpenStack, with the original goal of building an open source cloud operating system. In just over a year, the OpenStack community has expanded to encompass more than 110 organizations -- including tech giants Cisco, HP and Dell and others -- and has produced four software releases, with the latest named Diablo released last month. The code is coming from multiple sources: Eight different companies contributed code to some of the features in the recent Diablo release.

Other OpenStack news announcements include:

New ‘Chef’ Software for OpenStack Clouds

Opscode, a Seattle-based provider cloud infrastructure automation, announced the release of new Opscode Chef Cookbooks for rapidly deploying and automating core components of the newly released Diablo version of OpenStack. The cookbooks were developed in collaboration with Dell and Rackspace, Opscode said in a release.

The Chef Cookbooks enable easy deployment and automation of the core components of OpenStack, including computing, object storage, virtual machine image services, dashboard and identity. Opscode Chef powers the majority of sites deploying OpenStack, including Voxel, Mercado Libre and Cloudscaling, among others.

The new recipes include deployment cookbooks for five core OpenStack projects, including:

Mirantis Creates Center of Excellence for OpenStack

Mirantis, a California-based engineering services company focused on open source application infrastructure, announced established a Center of Excellence for OpenStack to help companies successfully deploy OpenStack projects.

The center will focus exclusively on OpenStack development and deployment. Currently staffed with 20 engineers and architects working on OpenStack projects with customers, Mirantis is already one of the largest OpenStack development organizations. Because of the growing demand, Mirantis expects to expand the engineering team to more than 50 members by early spring 2012.

Mirantis seeks to assist middleware and compute infrastructure providers intelligently integrate their solution offerings with the OpenStack ecosystem of products as well as offer service-level agreement (SLA) backed deployments of OpenStack to enterprise customers. The company has been an active member of the OpenStack community since its inception and has contributed multiple code commits to the OpenStack Compute and Identity projects. Mirantis is also one of the key organizers of the Bay Area’s OpenStack user group, hosting the quarterly community events in the Silicon Valley.

Big Switch Networks Joins OpenStack Cloud Community

At Interop New York, Big Switch Networks,an OpenFlow company bringing the benefits of virtualization and cloud architecture to enterprise networks, announced its participation in OpenStack, to enable Networking-as-a-Service.

"Software-defined networking is quickly growing in importance in the OpenStack community, and it's an essential part of cloud computing," said Kyle Forster, Big Switch Networks Co-Founder. "As an open networking architecture, we see OpenFlow as a perfect complement to OpenStack, and we're excited to get involved with the project."

Big Switch Networks will release an open source version of its OpenFlow Controller compatible with the OpenStack architecture and participate in the design of OpenStack's networking technology.

For more on OpenStack, visit: http://www.openstack.org.