Originally launched as an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) product by NASA and Rackspace hosting in 2010, the OpenStack Foundation has become the home for one of the biggest open source projects around. It boasts more than 200 member companies, including AT&T, AMD, Avaya, Canonical, Cisco, Dell and HP.
Organized around a six-month release cycle, the foundation’s OpenStack projects are developed to control pools of processing, storage and networking resources through a data center — all managed or provisioned through a Web-based dashboard, command-line tools or a RESTful API. So far, the collaborative development supported by the foundation has resulted in the creation of OpenStack components including OpenStack Compute (a cloud computing fabric controller that is the main part of an IaaS system), OpenStack Networking (a system for managing networks and IP addresses) and OpenStack Object Storage (a scalable redundant storage system).