OpenStack Summit: How Rackspace is Contributing to the Open Cloud

This week in Portland, the OpenStack Summit is being held. The bi-annual event is for the entire OpenStack community – from developers to users and everyone in between.

Jim Curry, our SVP of Private Cloud, took to the OpenStack Summit stage yesterday to deliver his keynote speech. He relayed the story of the summit over the past few years; in 2010, the summit was for developers to discuss the needs for OpenStack. In 2011/12, the summit grew to not only be for the developers but to also include early adopters who wanted to gain insight from the developers and other key players. This week, whilst the developers are still using the summit to plan releases, there are more customers attending - it is estimated that there are over 2,600 attendees, which shows that companies are more and more interested in OpenStack.

At Rackspace, we continue to actively contribute to OpenStack. In the Essex release, Rackspace contributed over half of the code. This has now decreased to c.14% of the code in the Grizzly release (releases are alphabetical, Havana will be next at the end of 2013). However, Jim sees the reduction of our contribution as a good signal: there were 45 different companies who contributed code to the latest release, meaning that no one company is in control of OpenStack, and with no one company in control we are able to work together to help OpenStack win in the cloud market.

Rackspace’s public cloud is already operating on the Grizzly release of OpenStack, only weeks after the updates were launched. The latest version of Rackspace Private Cloud was launched at the start of March, and in its first six weeks we’ve seen over 8,500 downloads of the software across the world.

As the operator of the world’s largest OpenStack cloud, we also announced yesterday the launch of the Rackspace Global Cloud Network. This will allow more people to get access to OpenStack clouds, delivering the benefits of OpenStack to a truly global audience.

To find out more about OpenStack, visit the foundation’s website at www.openstack.org.