9 More Cloud Computing Pioneers

March 19, 2013 Off By David
Object Storage

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Cloud computing is barely old enough to separate out a few pioneers who have made outstanding contributions to it. InformationWeek made its first attempt to do so Nov. 26, 2012, pulling 10 names off a long list of potential cloud leaders and explaining why they made the select group. Now we’re calling out another group of people whose contributions have frequently matched those of the first 10, but who have tended to labor a step back from the limelight or sometimes even in the shadows.

They include an open-source programmer, an industry consultant, entrepreneurs, authors, public speakers and software strategists. For the most part they are individuals, but we wanted to start off by looking at a team of pioneers: the Rackspace OpenStack team. No single individual at Rackspace is responsible for the company deciding to launch the OpenStack open source project — several individuals played important roles…

CEO of Rackspace Cloud Lew Moorman points out that even when Rackspace was offering hosted servers for lease, they were Linux servers tied into other open-source code in the Rackspace environment. As Rackspace Cloud was launched, it, too, was heavily tied to open source, offering virtual servers based on Xen. Noting the connection, a team of MySQL developers, members of the Drizzle Project, came to talk to Rackspace sometime after Sun acquired MySQL AB in late 2008. Drizzle was a MySQL fork and the last thing Sun was interested in was forks. Drizzle team members were wondering if Rackspace might offer steady sponsorship…

Read more from the source @ http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/9-more-cloud-computing-pioneers/240151032