Red Hat joins the OpenStack community

Red Hat, a maker of Linux-based corporate distribution, middleware, virtualization and cloud computing software, has finally joined the OpenStack community. It happened together with the formation of the 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 largely controlled the development process and this somewhat irritated other companies that enthusiastically joined the OpenSource project OpenStack (and there are already more than 150) to not only make some money. but to some extent be involved in the development management process of OpenStack.

NASA has never tried to actively influence OpenStack, so it handed over control to Rackspace, which, like any normal commercial vendor, wanted to retain control of the project for as long as possible.
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However, if you want an open source project to grow, sooner or later you have to let it go. Mark Collier, vice president of business development and marketing for Rackspace and co-founder 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, the Eclipse Foundation, and the Linux Foundation. They wanted to figure out how to focus OpenStack on the development of the project and secure its funding.

According to Koller, the main goal is to provide an “open development process driven by technical meritocracy,” and also invest in the community to draw attention to OpenStack and encourage the development of an ecosystem of service providers and companies earning from the support and use of 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 a platinum sponsor of OpenStack. Gold sponsors include Cisco Systems, Clearpath Networks, Cloudscaling, Dell, DreamHost, ITRI, Mirantis, Morphlabs, NetApp, Piston Cloud Computing, and Yahoo!

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

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

One of the companies that were not among the nineteen sponsors listed above is, of course, Citrix Systems. Last week, she launched the rival CloudStack open 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 from Citrix, and a reasonable question arises, why did NASA and Rackspace not do the same almost two years ago? Especially considering that OpenStack is distributed under the Apache license.

Perhaps the answer is that Rackspace wanted to retain control of the OpenStack project, and this is clearly seen when it comes to supporting APIs that are compatible with Amazon EC2 and S3. Rackspace strongly opposes this, and perhaps Red Hat too. And Citrix believes that supporting the Amazon API is not only desirable, but also crucial. And maybe this was the reason Citrix turned away from OpenStack.

Red Hat noted that the main reason for joining the OpenStack community was that the project was taken over by an independent organization and Red Hat now plans to provide commercial support for OpenStack.

I wonder how OpenStack and other Red Hat cloud software will coexist — the OpenShift PaaS platform and the CloudForms private cloud infrastructure tool? Do not be surprised if OpenStack is perfect for OpenShift and CloudForms. These cloud products have not yet been released to opensource, and Red Hat has never talked about their underlying code.

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