Red Hat Joins OpenStack Community

Original author: Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Red Hat, a maker of enterprise Linux distribution, middleware, virtualization, and cloud computing, has finally joined the OpenStack community. This happened along with the formation of an organization that will manage the development of an open cloud platform - the OpenStack Foundation .


Since the launch of the OpenStack project in July 2010, NASA and Rackspace have largely controlled the development process and this has annoyed other companies that enthusiastically joined the OpenStack OpenStack project (and there are already over 150 of them) in order to not only make some money, but to some extent participate in the OpenStack development management process.

NASA never tried to actively influence OpenStack, so it handed over the management to Rackspace, which, like any normal commercial vendor, wanted to maintain control of the project for as long as possible.

However, if you want an open source project to grow, sooner or later you must let it go. Mark Collier, vice president of business development and marketing at Rackspace and one of the founders of OpenStack, spoke about the progress in creating the OpenStack Foundation, an independent organization that will manage the project.

According to Koller, he and Jonathan Bryce have been working since last October to study various similar organizations, such as the Apache Software Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, and Linux Foundation. They wanted to figure out how to focus OpenStack's efforts on the development of the project and secure its financing.

According to Koller, the main goal is to provide an “open development process driven by technical meritocracy,” as well as invest in the community to draw attention to OpenStack and encourage the development of an ecosystem of service providers and companies that make money by supporting and using OpenStack.

In March, the structure of the future organization was determined and platinum and gold sponsors were found, and the news is that Red Hat, along with AT&T, Canonical, HP, IBM, Nebula, Rackspace, and SUSE Linux, signed a letter of intent to become an OpenStack platinum sponsor. Gold sponsors include Cisco Systems, Clearpath Networks, Cloudscaling, Dell, DreamHost, ITRI, Mirantis, Morphlabs, NetApp, Piston Cloud Computing, and Yahoo!

Koller says the OpenStack Foundation is currently in the process of forming a committee that will create legal documents for the organization.

“I don’t think it’s so fantastic that one day cloud computing will become the heart of our global economy, and that means that a lot is at stake now,” Koller writes. “Seeing the size of companies that are willing to invest serious resources in the development of OpenStack and who are convinced of the need for an open development model, I am almost sure that this will be an open future based on OpenStack. ”

One of the companies that was not included in the number of the above nineteen sponsors, of course, Citrix Systems. Last week, she launched her rival CloudStack open source cloud project.and transferred it to the Apache Software Foundation incubator, hoping to get ahead of OpenStack and become the dominant, fully open cloud platform. It was a very smart move on the part of Citrix, and the reasonable question arises, why NASA and Rackspace did not do the same almost two years ago? Especially considering that OpenStack is licensed under the Apache license.

Perhaps the answer is that Rackspace wanted to maintain control of the OpenStack project, and this is clearly seen when it comes to supporting APIs compatible with Amazon EC2 and S3. Rackspace is categorically against this, and possibly Red Hat too. And Citrix believes that Amazon API support is not only desirable, but also crucial. And maybe that was the reason Citrix turned its back on OpenStack.

Red Hat notedthat the main reason for joining the OpenStack community was that project management passed into the hands of an independent organization and now Red Hat plans to provide commercial support for OpenStack.

I wonder how OpenStack and other Red Hat cloud software — the OpenShift PaaS platform and the CloudForms private cloud infrastructure tool — will coexist. I won’t be surprised if OpenStack is perfect for OpenShift and CloudForms. These cloud products have not yet been released in opensource and at Red Hat they never talked about what kind of code lies at their core.

“In the coming months we will share more details on what this means for our partners and our customers,” wrote Brian Stevens., Technical Director of Red Hat - “We have been saying for a long time that open source is the future of enterprise infrastructure and cloud computing, and today, thanks to Rackspace and NASA, this future has become much closer.”

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