No, it’s not your imagination. You have been hearing more and more about OpenStack in recent weeks and you’re only going to be hearing a lot more as time goes by.
First, for those of you who haven’t met it yet, OpenStack is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing open-source software stack. It’s made up of seven core components: Compute, Object Storage, Identity, Dashboard, Block Storage, Network and Image Service. Put them together and you have everything you need to run a public or private IaaS cloud on Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS).
Of course, I could rattle off a whole laundry list of other IaaS cloud software stacks, but OpenStack is getting a lot of ink from the technology and business press recently. There are several reasons it’s getting so much attention.
At the top of the list, of course, is that OpenStack recently released a new version of its software stack, Grizzly. And as Forrester Research’s principal analyst for infrastructure and operations, James Staten, recently pointed out, with this release “Cisco, Red Hat, Rackspace, IBM, Intel, HP, and many other traditional enterprise suppliers concentrated much of their efforts over the past six months to hardening OpenStack and ensuring it would deliver against enterprise expectations and requirements.”
As Citigroup software analyst Walter Pritchard said in a note to clients, “In three short years, the open source OpenStack initiative has reached broad-based industry support towards an ambitious goal of providing a complete cloud-based infrastructure offering… there is simply too much momentum behind OpenStack development for the base case to not be at least moderate success.”