Cloud Computing: OpenStack Deployment Tool Goes Open Source

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

OpenStack is the open source success story of the contemporary era, a project that started as a gleam in the eye of Rackspace executives who wanted to compete with Amazon, and rapidly grew into a project with its own governing board and foundation.

It consists today of numerous distinct parts, all of them making progress on the problems that confront their individual areas of cloud computing. It’s been criticized for lacking the beneficent dictator who, it used to be believed, was a necessary force behind a successful open source project. That was before the procedures of an open source development process — and the ability to govern those seemingly chaotic procedures — were well understood. The Apache Software Foundation and Linux kernel development process supplied the models…

Even so, there are now so many contributors and so much activity behind OpenStack, not to mention $10 million in funding under its new organizational structure, that many observers believe it will be impossible for any single individual or software vendor to keep up. And therein sits the problem. Imagine an IT manager who wants his production software to be a fixed, immutable thing until he decides to apply specific changes — in a controlled way…

Read more from the source @ http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/openstack-deployment-tool-goes-open-sour/240151584