Why OpenStack Owes Its Success to Amazon

Who would have thunk it. The OpenStack Foundation now has a 24-person board, $10 million in funding, and, oh, yeah, 5,600 members. This is becoming more than momentum in the cloud computing market, and it certainly exceeds my expectations from when the standard was first launched.

OpenStack provides a platform to run a private cloud infrastructure, and it now boasts about 550,000 lines of code. Some cloud hosting providers, such as Rackspace and Hewlett-Packard, use the software to host their own services. More are working on OpenStack integration into public cloud services.

[ Stay on top of the current state of the cloud with InfoWorld’s special report, “Cloud computing in 2012.” Download it today! | Also check out our “Private Cloud Deep Dive,” our “Cloud Security Deep Dive,” our “Cloud Storage Deep Dive,” and our “Cloud Services Deep Dive.” ]

What’s interesting about OpenStack is not the fact that’s it’s cloud code free for the download, but that so much progress has been made in just two years. We can thank Amazon.com for that, coupled with huge and continued interest in open standards.

The meteoric rise of Amazon Web Services proved the viability of the public cloud marketplace. But domination by a single cloud provider scares the hell out of many organizations looking to use cloud services. Perhaps haunted by visions of Microsoft in the 1990s or IBM in the 1980s, many people actively sought cloud computing technology alternatives that were open and where the control of the technology was widely distributed. Enter OpenStack, an alternative that many now embrace.

Read More of Dave Linthicum’s Blog Post on InfoWorld