Cloud Computing: OpenStack – An Overview

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Frank J. Ohlhorst.

Back in July 2010, Rackspace Hosting and NASA jointly launched a new open-source cloud initiative known as OpenStack. The ultimate goal was to enable any organization to create and offer cloud computing services that run on standard hardware. Since that date, approximately six revisions of OpenStack have been released, and more than 150 companies have signed up to support the platform.

Simply put, OpenStack is a "cloud operating system" designed for the data center. What’s more, OpenStack is also viewed as the kernel for cloud operations, on which vendors can build all sorts of software to run on in the cloud…

In practice, OpenStack is a conglomeration of multiple open source projects and consists of an ever-growing mountain of Apache 2 code. It follows a development ideology of divide-and-conquer, in which individual modules are built to create an overall IaaS platform. Until recently, OpenStack consisted of three modules – Nova, for compute; Swift, for object storage; and Glance, an image service module…

Read more from the source @ http://www.networkcomputing.com/cloud-computing/openstack-an-overview/240142674