When OpenStack uncorks the champagne for its anniversary on Wednesday at OSCON (the Open Source Conference) in Portland, Ore., it doesn’t ought to cite surviving three tumultuous years or the selection of lines of code produced. It’ll have more qualitative gains to celebrate.
OpenStack is the de facto leader in open source code for the enterprise cloud. It’s moved decisively into the lead for the production of both cloud provisioning and management and software-defined networking — that also loosely defined area of personal cloud operations.
OpenStack is downloaded with great regularity because the prototype system for an individual cloud. In keeping with founding member and Rackspace’s senior VP of personal cloud Jim Curry, who spoke to us in an interview previous to the anniversary, the Rackspace release for personal cloud has seen 29,000 downloads.
Downloads, however, don’t mean much by themselves. What matters is the variety of downloads that bring about working implementations. The list of publicly recognized implementers is shorter, however it includes, as well as Rackspace and HP, such names as Comcast, Paypal and CERN. Also add Best Buy, Fidelity, Bloomberg and a fourth major enterprise user to be announced Thursday.
[ Would like to learn more about software-defined networking as component to OpenStack? See OpenStack Grizzly Has SDN Teeth].
It’s still too soon to check OpenStack to Linux, although Openstack adherents are quite keen on doing so. Linux, through hard experience, produced a kernel development process that imposed the discipline of adding only processes or code that complemented what was already there. It isn’t clear whether OpenStack, with its long list of code contributors, committers and sponsors (lots of them competitors with rival agendas) will institute such discipline or drift into feature bloat. I’ve heard the team leaders say no benevolent dictator – i.e., Linus Torvalds — is required at their project. Perhaps not, but some central disciplinary intelligence is wanted. With out a Torvalds at the scene, it isn’t clear who’s liable for such discipline at OpenStack. But let’s give OpenStack a possibility to mature and show us the way it addresses the difficulty.
Likewise, it’s hard to get past the easy quantitative measures to determine how the brand new foundation and its development process are really working. We all know OpenStack now has over a million lines of code, 231 company members, 238 unique contributors to the Grizzly release, etc. However the project also is taking over a way more international flavor, with members from 121 countries. Basically, the subsequent OpenStack Summit will meet in November in Hong Kong — the 1st to ensue outside the U.S.
Chinese interest in OpenStack is massive since it opens wide the door to cloud computing. Developers on the Chinese firm Sina, previously contributors to the project, have helped form the China Open Source Cloud League, which adds more contributors to the project, in accordance with Curry.
Along with its greater international focus, there’s another sign of growing OpenStack maturity. Each subproject of OpenStack holds an election every six months among active contributors to make a decision who should function technical lead of the project, a key position. No changes in these posts would suggest that one company’s or one faction’s influence was sufficient to keep up the similar lead indefinitely. To illustrate, early on, Rackspace and Nebula technology execs dominated these positions because Rackspace was a co-founder and organizer, as were the founders of Nebula, who came out of NASA.
In April, Russell Bryant of Red Hat replaced Vishvananda Ishaya of Nebula, who had served as technical lead of the Nova compute project for two.5 years. Further, Dan Wendlandt, of the software-defined networking firm Nicira, was the technical lead at the Quantum networking project for a year, with Nicira acting as a chief contributor. After Nicira was acquired by VMware, a competitor of OpenStack, Nicira remained a contributor but Wendlandt was replaced by Marshall McClain of Dreamhost. In other words, what could have been a narrow band of leadership reflecting company interests has gradually given method to broader leadership, suggesting a meritocracy of normal elections is at work.
In three years, OpenStack has come far in both its internal organization and its acceptance on earth. It will become as much as the company’s current management team to attain additional milestones going forward.
Says Chris Kemp, former CIO of NASA and CEO of OpenStack firm Nebula: “It’s hard to locate a working laptop or computer company, apart from Amazon, that isn’t portion of OpenStack. It’s occupying a tremendous void that had to be filled… Everyone agrees, a higher 25 years of computing can be open.”
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