OpenStack Compute: Ready for Prime Time?

OpenStack, the open source cloud platform promoted by Rackspace Hosting and NASA, has compute and storage components — and both seem to be making progress. A new OpenStack Compute release, called Bexar, could drive new partnerships. And its sister effort, OpenStack Object Storage, has seen its first commercial-scale deployment.

It’s not all good news for cloud service providers seeking open options. OpenStack’s press release indicates that it won’t be until April’s OpenStack Cactus release that the compute platform will be ready to deploy at the service provider level. But let’s look at what Bexar brings to the table today.

New Features

The lion’s share of Bexar updates goes to OpenStack Compute, which gets support for the following enterprise virtualization technologies and Internet standards:

For OpenStack Object Storage, the new features are limited to tighter integration with Compute and the ability to store files up to an unlimited size.

New Partners

Canonical, Cisco, Extreme Networks and Grid Dynamics have all joined the 50 or so member companies of the OpenStack alliance, committing themselves to advancing the code-base and driving adoption.

Canonical has been especially vocal in their support for the project, and the next Ubuntu Server release will include OpenStack. For Cisco’s part, they plan on forming a development team specifically to write code and specifications for OpenStack.

New Documentation

Bexar sees the launch of a documentation repository on OpenStack’s site: a lot of partners including Microsoft and Rackspace contributed guides and references to help with OpenStack deployment.

These are the growing pains of a very important project in the IT world, with service providers and customers alike listing a fear of vendor lock-in as a major hurdle blocking cloud deployments. All the same, OpenStack has a little way to go before cloud service providers can start building real enterprise-ready offerings on top of it.

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