OpenStack Reaches Milestone With Launch Of Foundation

Sept. 19, 2012 will go down as a big day for OpenStack.

The open source cloud computing platform project began about two years ago as a collaborative effort between Rackspace and NASA, along with a couple dozen other companies and a few dozen developers. Since then, it's grown to include 180 official partnering companies - including some of the biggest names in technology, such as AT&T, Cisco, HP, Dell, IBM, Red Hat and VMware - and an ecosystem of 400 contributing developers and more than 5,600 users.

One company seems to have stood out above the rest when it comes to OpenStack. Rackspace is not just a founding member of the project, but its president has been an outspoken advocate of the project and the company has made significant investments in powering its own cloud offering from the OpenStack code. In some ways, it has felt as though OpenStack has been a Rackspace project.