Yesterday morning at the Web 2.0 summit out in San Francisco I sat in a session led by RackSpace‘s CTO John Engates. After the session finished I grabbed some time with John to learn more about his thoughts on OpenStack, the open source cloud platform that Rackspace, along with NASA helped kick off.
Some of the ground John covers:
How OpenStack directly addresses some of the most common reservations people have about the cloud.
One of the featured speakers during the kick off of the OpenStack design summit yesterday was NASA CTO of IT, Chris Kemp. OpenStack is an open source cloud platform and the compute side of the project is based on code from NASA’s Nebula cloud.
I got some time with Chris and learned about NASA’s involvement in the project:
Some of the ground Chris covers:
Nebula and the cloud computing platform code base
NASA’s huge data needs and what they do with the data
Serendipity: NASA’s cloud engine + Rackspace’s file system engine
How NASA is working with the project: a two-way street
The first code that is available from the OpenStack project, and its available today, is the code for the storage effort, “Object Storage.” The man at the technical helm of this effort is Will Reese of Rackspace. Will’s daytime job is development manager and system architect for Rackspace’s Cloud Files, the source of the code for Object Storage. Will and I grabbed some time at last week’s design summit and he briefed me on the project:
Some of the topics Will tackles:
Object Storage is based on the open sourced code from Rackspace’s Cloud Files.
Rackspace will lead the project to get the community kick started but is looking for the community to take over.
Storage and Compute will each have their own tech boards made up of members from Rackspace, NASA and the community.
In the second half of the interview Will takes us through a quick overview of the cloud files architecture which is written in python, leverages eventlib, and borrows concepts from memcache and some key-value stores –> To learn more, check out Will’s talk at OSCON this Wednesday.
Today Rackspace and NASAannounced OpenStack, an open source cloud platform that they are collaborating on and building a community around. Last week the inaugural OpenStack design summit was held here in Austin with 20 companies from around the world, including Dell, participating.
During one of the breaks I grabbed sometime with Rackspace’s cloud president, Lew Moorman to learn more about the effort and get his thoughts:
Some of the topics Lew tackles:
What is OpenStack (an opensource set of technologies for building clouds…)
Why Rackspace decided to opensource their code .
How Rackspace got hooked up with NASA and what each brings to the party.
Taking Nebula’s core foundation and adding some elements from Rackspace’s side in order to put together a release candidate that should be available to the community this Fall.
At the inaugural design summit for OpenStack, an open source set of technologies for building clouds, Nebula’s chief architect Josh McKenty played a prominent role in leading the assembled folks. I caught Josh during a break and chatted with him about Nebula and NASA’s role in the newly announced OpenStack project. Here’s what he had to say:
Some of the topics Josh tackles:
What is Nebula (hint: NASA’s, primarily IaaS, cloud computing platform)
The history of Nebula and how it morphed from nasa.net.
Why NASA wants a cloud – and the importance of having an elastic set of resources.
NASA and Nebula’s use of open source and how it has evolved (they don’t simply fling tarballs over the wall anymore and they can use licenses other than the “NASA open source agreement”)
A match made in heaven: NASA has put together a strong compute platform and was looking to building a real object store, Rackspace had a strong object store and work looking for a new compute platform.
Posted by Barton George 
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