page_title: OpenStack
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: OpenStack / History
caption_attribution_description: English: This is a picture of the Nebula cloud computing container located at NASA Ames Research Center.
context_page_description: OpenStack is a free open standard cloud computing platform,
  mostly deployed as infrastructure-as-a-service in both public and private clouds where virtual servers and other resources are made available to users. The software platform consists of interrelated components that control diverse, multi-vendor hardware pools of processing, storage, and networking resources throughout a data center. Users either manage it through a web-based dashboard, through command-line tools, or through RESTful web services.
  OpenStack began in 2010 as a joint project of Rackspace Hosting and NASA. As of 2012, it was managed by the OpenStack Foundation, a non-profit corporate entity established in September 2012 to promote OpenStack software and its community. More than 500 companies have joined the project.
context_section_description: In July 2010, Rackspace Hosting and NASA jointly launched an open-source cloud-software initiative known as OpenStack. The mission statement was "to produce the ubiquitous Open Source Cloud Computing platform that will meet the needs of public and private clouds regardless of size, by being simple to implement and massively scalable".
  The OpenStack project intended to help organizations offer cloud-computing services running on standard hardware. The community's first official release, code-named Austin, appeared three months later on 21 October 2010, with plans to release regular updates of the software every few months. The early code came from NASA's Nebula platform as well as from Rackspace's Cloud Files platform.  The original cloud architecture was designed by the NASA Ames Web Manager, Megan A. Eskey, and was a 2009 open source architecture called OpenNASA v2.0.  The cloud stack and open stack modules were merged and released as open source by the NASA Nebula team in concert with Rackspace.
  In 2011, developers of the Ubuntu Linux distribution adopted OpenStack with an unsupported technology preview of the OpenStack "Bexar" release for Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal". Ubuntu's sponsor Canonical then introduced full support for OpenStack clouds, starting with OpenStack's Cactus release.
  OpenStack became available in Debian Sid from the Openstack "Cactus" release in 2011, and the first release of Debian including OpenStack was Debian 7.0 (code name "Wheezy"), including OpenStack 2012.1 (code name: "Essex").
  In October 2011, SUSE announced the public preview of the industry's first fully configured OpenStack powered appliance based on the "Diablo" OpenStack release. In August 2012, SUSE announced its commercially supported enterprise OpenStack distribution based on the "Essex" release.
  In November 2012, The UK's Government Digital Service (GDS) launched Inside Government based on the OpenNASA v2.0 Government as a Platform (GaaP) model.
  In 2012, Red Hat announced a preview of their OpenStack distribution, beginning with the "Essex" release. After another preview release, Red Hat introduced commercial support for OpenStack with the "Grizzly" release, in July 2013.
  The OpenStack organization has grown rapidly and is supported by more than 540 companies.
  In 2012 NASA withdrew from OpenStack as an active contributor, and instead made the strategic decision to use Amazon Web Services for cloud-based services. In July 2013, NASA released an internal audit citing lack of technical progress and other factors as the agency's primary reason for dropping out as an active developer of the project and instead focus on the use of public clouds. This report is contradicted in part by remarks made by Ames Research Center CIO, Ray O'Brien.
  In December 2013, Oracle announced it had joined OpenStack as a Sponsor and planned to bring OpenStack to Oracle Solaris, Oracle Linux, and many of its products. It followed by announcing Oracle OpenStack distributions for Oracle Solaris and for Oracle Linux using Icehouse on 24 September 2014.
  In May 2014, HP announced HP Helion and released a preview of HP Helion OpenStack Community, beginning with the IceHouse release. HP has operated HP Helion Public Cloud on OpenStack since 2012.
  At the 2014 Interop and Tech Field Day, software-defined networking was demonstrated by Avaya using Shortest path bridging and OpenStack as an automated campus, extending automation from the data center to the end device, removing manual provisioning from service delivery.
  As of March 2015, NASA still makes use of OpenStack private cloud and has RFPs out for OpenStack public cloud support.
caption: NASA's Nebula platform
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