OpenStack Cookbooks for the Cloud

Within IT circles these days there’s a lot of excitement over OpenStack, a suite of open source software that manages virtual machine deployments on a scale required to support cloud computing deployments.

Developed by Rackspace and NASA, OpenStack is rapidly becoming a de facto standard as evidenced by the number of vendors that showed up this week for the OpenStack Design Summit.

What gets people excited about OpenStack is the number of vendors that are contributing code to a project that should prove to be critical in terms of advancing interoperability across the cloud. The more cloud computing service providers that use OpenStack, the easier it will be to create and manage federated cloud computing services that will be delivered by multiple service providers.

Almost as a side benefit, the OpenStack software is free, which stand in sharp contrast to the licensing fees that VMware wants to charge to deliver similar capabilities.

To move the OpenStack agenda further along OpsCode, which was recently acquired by Dimension Data, this week released a series of “Chef cookbooks” to automate the configuration of OpenStack deployment in various types of enterprise IT environments.

According to Jesse Robbins, chief community officer for Opscode, as the OpenStack ecosystem continues to gain momentum the benefits of being part of a community that is actively supported by some of the biggest names in the industry will only continue to multiply at an exponential rate.

Vendor politics aside, the simple fact of the matter is that solution providers in the channel that build cloud computing services based on OpenStack are going to have a competitive advantage in terms of accessing virtualization and cloud computing management tools at a much lower cost. That doesn’t mean there are not additional opportunities surrounding VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V stacks. But it does mean that that the cost of building cloud computing platforms based on those stacks is going to be higher.