OpenStack is a free and open-source cloud computing software platform.[2] Users primarily deploy it as an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) solution. The technology consists of a series of interrelated projects that control pools of processing, storage, and networking resources throughout a data center—which users manage through a web-based dashboard, command-line tools, or a RESTful API. OpenStack.org released it under the terms of the Apache License.
OpenStack began in 2010 as a joint project of Rackspace Hosting and NASA. Currently, it is managed by the OpenStack Foundation, a non-profit corporate entity established in September 2012[3] to promote OpenStack software and its community.[4] More than 200 companies have joined the project, including Arista Networks, AT&T, AMD, Avaya, Canonical, Cisco, Dell, EMC, Ericsson, Go Daddy, Hewlett-Packard, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Mellanox, Mirantis, NEC, NetApp, Nexenta, Oracle, PLUMgrid, Pure Storage, Red Hat, SolidFire, SUSE Linux, VMware and Yahoo!.[5][6][7][8][9][10][11]
The OpenStack community collaborates around a six-month, time-based release cycle with frequent development milestones.[12] During the planning phase of each release, the community gathers for the OpenStack Design Summit to facilitate developer working-sessions and to assemble plans.[13]
The most recent OpenStack Summit was held in Paris in November 2014.[14] The previous summit in May 2014 in Atlanta, drew 4,500 attendees, a 50% increase from the Hong Kong Summit six months earlier
