Launched in 2010 as a collaborative effort between NASA and Rackspace, OpenStack was created as an open-source solution for compute and storage management. By combining NASA's Nova project (compute) and Rackspace's Swift project (storage), the initial release of OpenStack delivered powerful results to both small and midsize business users. Six years and 12 releases later, OpenStack is now demonstrating the completeness and robustness enterprise-level CIOs need to address the growing requirements their businesses demand. The flexibility, lower cost and openness that come with OpenStack are some of the key features that make it so appealing. Maturing code and governance continue to drive OpenStack adoption among enterprise organizations, and it's backed by some of the world's leading technology infrastructure providers. OpenStack is also the foundation for one of the world's largest global e-commerce platforms, and it's continuing to gain adoption across a variety of industries, including film and media, retail, finance and insurance, consumer goods and manufacturing. Organizations are able to deploy OpenStack as a public or private cloud, or in support of a hybrid model across both enterprise and public cloud data centers. OpenStack also gives organizations the ability to manage all deployment models—bare metal, virtualization (using all leading hypervisors) and soon containers—with one platform. This kind of flexibility is critical for enterprise clouds.
- eWeek