When Rackspace first started talking with me about open sourcing their cloud software, I was truly intrigued.  The idea of releasing the software behind their cloud was unexpected given that most cloud providers treat their infrastructure, and particularly their control software, as a differentiator.  One of the things that make the software so valuable is the hard earned lessons from building, scaling, and maintaining a cloud.  An infrastructure that has actually been deployed and scaled to cloud size has real value to everyone trying to build a cloud.  So when a company that has been in the cloud business for a long time in “cloud years” decides to open up and share their software, you have to stop and look.

Last week, Rackspace held an event that brought together a veritable who’s who in cloud computing “to validate the code and ratify the project roadmap”.  The sheer size of the summit was a tribute to both Rackspace and those who are looking to advance cloud computing.  What I found most interesting was the number of attendees that are potential competitors to Rackspace – other cloud providers or hosters looking at getting into cloud computing.  Of course, open source means that anyone can use and improve the code, but the guys at Rackspace inviting these guys and them attending says a lot about the industry.  When I talked to Lew Moorman and Jim Curry about this, they said it was simple; they want to compete in the cloud the same way they compete in their hosting business -- with their service.  During the design summit, the Rackspace crew stated that they are going to do everything in the open; this means that they are going to put it all out there and not hold back certain pieces as private code.  Given this, I really believe that they want to compete on their “Fanatical Support”.

Rackspace and NASA are teaming up to release the source code for implementing a cloud – Rackspace is providing their Cloud Files software for building a scalable object store system and NASA is providing their Nebula code for building a Cloud Server system.   The developers from both Rackspace and NASA presented details about their software, lessons learned, and future directions, and then they turned to the attendees to solicit requirements and suggestions.  Hot topics included APIs, controls and methods for distributing VMs into the cloud (scheduling), and Networking.

The OpenStack project will utilize the Rackspace API, but will also support API “extensions” so that a number of APIs can be added.  It is no surprise that there was desire to support the Amazon API since it is already a “standard” of sorts, and is the primary API for NASA’s Nebula component.  The question here is that if the OpenStack software supports multiple APIs for controlling the clouds, what is the true API, and how will OpenStack help drive standards if it supports multiple options?

A lot of companies out there are spending a lot of money and resources to build clouds, and the biggest are rather secretive about how they do it.  This is a bold move by Rackspace, NASA, and all of those supporting the effort to drive a fully open project to build the clouds to compete against proprietary solutions.  We look forward to more clouds to target both inside the enterprise and in the public domain because we believe that more options will help move everyone closer to a better way of computing – Cloud Computing.

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