The whole world is buzzing on the cloud and cloud related technologies. Would you like to know the history of the cloud ? Let’s see. The private cloud has been started with Eucalyptus & Opennebula around 2003-2008 period and these both cloud software are almost similar to Amazon AWS (Pubic cloud). In 2009, NASA require cloud computing for their projects and they created project called “nova”. But NASA was not happy with “nova” and they have decided to scrap it. Nova developers got permission from NASA to make the “nova” code as opensource. The “nova” is based on Ruby language.
In 2010, Rackspace and NASA have jointly launched the open-source cloud-software project called “Openstack”. The OpenStack project is intended to help organizations offer cloud-computing services running on standard hardware. The initial code for openstack has been taken from Nebula(NASA Project). Rackspace has contributed to openstack on storage services part in the name of “swift” which is similar to Amazon s3. On the computing part , again “nova” become live but not with RUBY code. Because “SWIFT” is based on python and nova developers are forced to rewrite it in python to support swift.
What’s Next ? The first version of openstack released in 21st Oct 2010 and it has been named as “Austin”.
| Openstack Release | Release date | Code Names |
| Austin | 21-Oct-10 | Nova, Swift |
| Bexar | 3-Feb-11 | Nova, Glance, Swift |
| Cactus | 15-Apr-11 | Nova, Glance, Swift |
| Diablo | 22-Sep-11 | Nova, Glance, Swift |
| Essex | 5-Apr-12 | Nova, Glance, Swift, Horizon, Keystone |
| Folsom | 27-Sep-12 | Nova, Glance, Swift, Horizon, Keystone, Quantum, Cinder |
| Grizzly | 4-Apr-13 | Nova, Glance, Swift, Horizon, Keystone, Quantum, Cinder |
| Havana | 17-Oct-13 | Nova, Glance, Swift, Horizon, Keystone, Neutron, Cinder, Heat, Ceilometer |
| Icehouse | 17-Apr-14 | Nova, Glance, Swift, Horizon, Keystone, Neutron, Cinder, Heat, Ceilometer, Trove |
| Juno | 16-Oct-14 | Nova, Glance, Swift, Horizon, Keystone, Neutron, Cinder, Heat, Ceilometer, Trove, Sahara |
| Kilo | 30-Apr-15 | Nova, Glance, Swift, Horizon, Keystone, Neutron, Cinder, Heat, Ceilometer, Trove, Sahara, Ironic |
| Liberty | 16-Oct-15 | Nova, Glance, Swift, Horizon, Keystone, Neutron, Cinder, Heat, Ceilometer, Trove, Sahara, Ironic, Zaqar, Manila, Designate, Barbican |
| Mitaka | Not Announced | Nova, Glance, Swift, Horizon, Keystone, Neutron, Cinder, Heat, Ceilometer, Trove, Sahara, Ironic, Zaqar, Manila, Designate, Barbican |
Refer here for code Names:
| Compute (Nova) |
| Image Service (Glance) |
| Object Storage (Swift) |
| Dashboard (Horizon) |
| Identity Service (Keystone) |
| Networking (Neutron) |
| Block Storage (Cinder) |
| Orchestration (Heat) |
| Telemetry (Ceilometer) |
| Database (Trove) |
| Elastic Map Reduce (Sahara) |
| Bare Metal Provisioning (Ironic) |
| Multiple Tenant Cloud Messaging (Zaqar) |
| Shared File System Service (Manila) |
| DNSaaS (Designate) |
| Security API (Barbican) |
Opnestack is managed by the OpenStack Foundation, a non-profit corporate entity established in September 2012.
You might be thinking what happened to the initial private cloud projects Eucalyptus & Opennebula. HP has Joined the Openstack project. HP bought Eucalyptus. They are using some functionality of Eucalyptus to integrate Amazon cloud in the hybrid clouds. Opennebula is still available for the customers and going strong but not sure how long since all the big IT giants are promoting Openstack.
In 2011, developers of the Ubuntu Linux distribution adopted OpenStack with an unsupported technology preview of the OpenStack. Ubuntu’s sponsor Canonical then introduced full support for OpenStack clouds, starting with OpenStack’s Cactus release.
Why organization can’t avoid the Openstack ?
- Openstack is an open-source cloud software which means it is free to use.
- The Big IT giants are supporting the Openstack which includes SUSE, Red Hat, IBM, RackSpace, Dell, Cisco,HP , Oracle, Mirantis, VMturbo etc..
- It runs on standard hardware.
- OpenStack is the only cloud solution that allows for mixed hypervisor IT environments, which will become increasingly fragmented over time. (Ex: KVM ,Xen, ESXi , QEMU)
- According to the analysis, Openstack will take another one or two years to reach the position what Linux accomplished in 15 years. This is because of Opensource acceptance, support offerings by company and Cost effective solutions.
Hope this article is informative to you. UnixArnea’s Openstack journey will continue.