Today Rackspace and the Nebula team at NASA announced OpenStack.org, an Open Source initiative designed to foster the emergence of technology standards and interoperability in the cloud computing market. It received support from Citrix, Dell, and 25 other leading cloud computing companies including Cloud.com. As the developer of the CloudStack™ technology, and a strong proponent of open source technologies, we at Cloud.com are enthusiastic supporters of the OpenStack initiative.

The OpenStack initiative is good for our customers. It’s fitting that the OpenStack initiative is championed by two potential customers, Rackspace and NASA. As technology innovators they both saw a pressing need to promote cloud technology standards and interoperability. This benefits everyone who is building public and private clouds. Flexibility, choice and interoperability are good for our customers.

The OpenStack initiative is good for the industry. Despite the immense popularity of Amazon EC2 and private clouds built on VMware vSphere, true industry-wide standards and interoperability have yet to emerge, leaving customers locked-in and developers frustrated over the fragmentation that reduces their ability to migrate workloads into the cloud of their choice. By contributing code, committing resources, and inviting the rest of the industry to participate, the OpenStack initiative represents the latest and the most promising industry-wide efforts in driving technology standards and cloud interoperability.

The OpenStack initiative is good for open source. We at Cloud.com are fanatic believers of open source technology. We built our product on great open source technologies such as Linux, Java, Python, Xen, and KVM. We ship our product under an open source licensing model. We look forward to drawing from and contributing code to the OpenStack community. As the first project released under the initiative, the Cloud File technology is immediately useful for anyone who is building a cloud using Cloud.com CloudStack. We are committed to our own CloudStack open source effort, and by working closely with the OpenStack community, we will be able to increase the velocity of innovation in cloud technologies.