Private cloud becomes possible
In 2010 Amazon Web Services dominates the public cloud — EC2 (2006), S3 (2006), RDS, CloudFront — without truly comparable alternatives. Organisations wanting private or hybrid cloud (for regulatory, cost, or data sovereignty reasons) lack mature open source tools to build it.
OpenStack is born in this gap as collaboration between NASA — which had developed Nebula, an internal IaaS platform — and Rackspace, a hosting provider with its own object storage solution. The project was announced in July 2010 as an open source initiative under Apache 2.0 with a six-month release cadence.
The first three releases:
- Austin (October 2010) — first release, Nova + Swift
- Bexar (February 2011) — second, adding Glance for VM images
- Cactus (15 April 2011) — third, consolidation
Core components
Nova — compute orchestrator. Manages VMs through hypervisors (KVM, Xen, Hyper-V), exposes AWS EC2-style REST APIs, coordinates scheduling across compute node pools, handles networking (in the initial design; later split off into Neutron).
Swift — distributed object storage, inspired by the Amazon S3 model. Rackspace contribution from internal code (Cloud Files). No single point of failure, configurable replication, eventual consistency, REST API.
Glance — VM image registry service (introduced in Bexar). Provides catalogue and distribution of images to Nova’s compute nodes.
Keystone — will arrive in Essex (April 2012): identity service, unified authentication, authorisation via roles/projects/domains.
The communitarian ambition
OpenStack adopts an open communitarian governance model: no single vendor owns the project, decisions are made by elected Technical Committees, releases are public. This differs from similar-in-intent but different-in-control strategies (e.g. Eucalyptus, another open source IaaS founded 2008 under GPL, much more founder-controlled).
As of 2011 industrial adhesion grows rapidly: HP, Dell, IBM, Intel, AT&T, Canonical (Ubuntu), Red Hat, SUSE, Cisco sign up as corporate members. In September 2012 the OpenStack Foundation will be formally established as an independent entity.
Competitors and alternatives
By mid-2011 the open source IaaS space includes:
- Eucalyptus — pioneering, 2008, AWS API-compatible, GPL licence then open core. Relative decline as OpenStack grows
- OpenNebula — European project (Ibero America), IaaS for HPC, different focus
- CloudStack (Cloud.com / Citrix) — more enterprise-oriented, will move to Apache Foundation in 2012
- oVirt (Red Hat) — virtualisation management, not complete IaaS
OpenStack attracts the largest adhesion thanks to its open model and industrial endorsement.
Enterprise adoption
By 2011-2013 OpenStack starts entering production:
- NASA continues internal use
- Wikimedia Foundation — Wikimedia Labs backend
- CERN — private cloud project for the laboratory (later one of the largest deployments in the world)
- Rackspace Cloud — public offering based on OpenStack
- HP Cloud — public launch based on OpenStack (later discontinued)
- European and American universities and research centres
In Italy: INFN (National Institute of Nuclear Physics) adopts OpenStack for private cloud in scientific context. First OpenStack deployments in Italian universities and PA in subsequent years.
Role in cloud history
OpenStack is the first industrially credible attempt to build an alternative to AWS public cloud with an open source multi-vendor model. Its existence lets governments, regulated companies, telco operators, scientific HPC facilities build private clouds with APIs compatible with common styles.
The subsequent evolution — Kubernetes (2014) and the shift of gravity from IaaS to PaaS/CaaS — will relativise OpenStack’s role but not replace it: as of 2024 OpenStack is still used in thousands of deployments, including Europe’s largest single private cloud (CERN).
References: OpenStack Cactus (15 April 2011). Project announcement July 2010 (NASA + Rackspace). Components: Nova (compute), Swift (object storage), Glance (image registry). Apache 2.0 licence. OpenStack Foundation (September 2012).