When OpenStack uncorks the champagne for its anniversary on Wednesday at OSCON (the Open Source Conference) in Portland, Ore., it doesn’t need to cite surviving three tumultuous years or the number of lines of code produced. It will have more qualitative gains to celebrate.
OpenStack is the de facto leader in open source code for the enterprise cloud. It’s moved decisively into the lead for the production of both cloud provisioning and management and software-defined networking — that still loosely defined area of private cloud operations.
OpenStack is downloaded with great regularity as the prototype system for a private cloud. According to founding member and Rackspace’s senior VP of private cloud Jim Curry, who spoke to us in an interview prior to the anniversary, the Rackspace release for private cloud has seen 29,000 downloads.
Downloads, however, don’t mean much by themselves. What matters is the number of downloads that lead to working implementations. The list of publicly recognized implementers is shorter, but it includes, in addition to Rackspace and HP, such names as Comcast, Paypal and CERN. Also add Best Buy, Fidelity, Bloomberg and a fourth major enterprise user to be announced Thursday.