OpenStack made its debut in 2010—aimed to provide an open-source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds. Learn more about this Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform and see how it's evolving the landscape of cloud.
Written by Joe Cropper
During the summer of 2010, RackSpace Hosting and NASA teamed up to build the OpenStack platform, whose goal was to provide cloud computing services on commodity hardware. The OpenStack components span the entire cloud computing stack, ranging from the typical compute, storage, and network pieces to architectural elements such as image, orchestration, and metrics—all of the basic building blocks of a cloud. With strong corporate sponsorship and a thriving development ecosystem, OpenStack is on its way to being to the cloud world what Linux is to the operating system world.