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Hosting company Rackspace and NASA have announced launch of a new open source cloud platform called OpenStack. In addition to Rackspace and NASA, the new Apache-licensed project is backed by a number of technology industry leaders, including Citrix, Dell, Intel and AMD
I've read a bit of angst about cloud lock-in, a lot of weed pulling in the form of interoperability standards for the cloud, and a manifesto or two about 'Open Cloud'. And in between, I've seen lots of interesting new tools for cloud computing, and lots of narratives about how the tools, combined with the formalization of use cases, pave the way for open clouds.
NASA is dropping Eucalyptus from its Nebula infrastructure cloud not only because its engineers believe the open source platform can't achieve the sort of scale they require, but also because it isn't entirely open source.
Medium businesses (100 to 999 employees) in Japan are showing latent potential to drive usage of open source software, particularly on the server database scene, according to a survey conducted by AMI-Partners.
Red Hat's Deltacloud project is developing a open source standardised API for addressing different cloud architectures in a uniform way. Cloud service users can use the Deltacloud API to access Amazon's EC2 as well as private clouds that are based on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation (RHEL-V); drivers for private VMware ESX clouds and the cloud services offered by Rackspace are to follow.
For years I've assumed that Japan is not a big contributor to open source. My first real open source-related job was in embedded Linux, which saw plenty of big electronics OEMs using Linux (e.g., Sony, Matsushita, etc.), but not really doing anything in the way of contributing to open-source software.
The challenges to government's adoption and participation in open-source communities is often thought to be a simpe culture clash, but in reality it goes deeper than that, accordning to NASA's newly-appointed chief technology officer.
There are more than a few of us who would be overjoyed to see Open Source take over the world. For the geeks at NASA, though, the world is not enough. Open Source is nothing new for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration — Linux Journal looked at Linux use in NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratories way back in May 2000.
