Why OpenStack Works

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SAN DIEGO. The last two years have been very eventful for Jonathan Bryce. Bryce is the Executive Director of the OpenStack Foundation, overseeing a project that has become highly influential since he helped create it two years ago.

Today at the OpenStack Summit, Bryce took the keynote stage to detail the progress and the path forward for the open source cloud computing platform.

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OpenStack was jointly created by Rackspace and NASA. Now there are over 180 contributing companies and over 6,000 individual members. The core OpenStack code base has also grown in the last two years.

When OpenStack started, the Nova compute project from NASA had 9,000 lines of code and the Swift object storage platform from Rackspace had 20,000 lines of code. Today are nearly 600,000 lines of code.

Bryce sees the upward trajectory of OpenStack’s involvement and contributions as being proof positive that OpenStack will succeed.

“Not many software projects have that kind of engagement and volume,” Bryce said. “And the bulk of that code growth effort has occurred over the last 12 months.”

Bryce said that as the community grows and the software matures, it creates a lot of opportunity for both developers and users.

The new OpenStack Foundation that was formally launched at the end of September is a huge step forward as well.

“We’re now an independent community and we’re in control of our destiny,” Bryce said. “It’s well funded and has support from a broad base of membership”

He added that with the OpenStack Foundation there is now a secure and independent home for the project that will be able to take care of OpenStack for the long term.

The organization of the OpenStack Foundation is also seen by Bryce as being part of the way forward to success. There is a 24-member board that holds legal responsibility for the project. The Technical Committee is responsible for the code and is run as a technical meritocracy. Then there is the User committee, which works to get active feedback from users.

“We really want to make sure we have the structure that will make the different constituents that we have, able to get what they need out of OpenStack,” Bryce said.

Finally, it is the passion behind OpenStack that makes it work as well as it does. “We have a lot of passion about what we do and we have passion because we care,” Bryce said.”People really feel invested in this and that’s a great opportunity for us to do great things.”