I have been hearing and seeing a lot about OpenStack cloud computing these days but still haven’t got a clue what it is all about. Could someone assist me to understand this concept and how I can patronize it to benefit my business? Is it expensive to join the OpenStack bandwagon?
The Openstack Cloud Computing Service Concept
The OpenStack cloud computing is an open source IaaS or Infrastructure as a Service. It is a project for creating and organizing big groups of virtual private servers within a data center. The objectives of the program are to support interoperability among cloud services and to permit businesses to create Amazon-like cloud services in their own data centers.
OpenStack is available for free under the Apache 2.0 license because it is open source. In the media, OpenStack is frequently referred to as “the Linux of the Cloud”. It is also compared to the projects Apache CloudStack and Eucalyptus. These are 2 other open source cloud initiatives or projects.
NASA or the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has teamed up with Rackspace to develop OpenStack. Rackspace is a managed hosting as well as a cloud computing service provider. Rackspace supplied the code that controls the storage as well as the content delivery service or cloud files and production servers or the cloud servers while NASA contributed the technology that controls Nebula, its high performance computing, networking, and data storage service that permits researchers on working with huge scientific data sets.
Officially, OpenStack became an independent non-profit organization on September 2012.