These two short items are sidebars for my “One Cloud, Many Providers: The OpenStack Interp Challenge” post. They provide additional context for the more focused question in the post: “At a fundamental level, OpenStack has yet to decide if it’s an infrastructure product or a open software movement. Is there a path to be both?”
Background 1: OpenStack, The Early Days
How did we get here? It’s worth noting that 2011 OpenStack was structured as a heterogenous vendor playground. At the inaugural OpenStack summit in Austin when the project was just forming around NASA’s Nova and Rackspace’s Swift projects, monolithic cloud stacks were a very real threat. VMware and Amazon were the de facto standards but closed and proprietary. The open alternatives, CloudStack (Cloud.com), Eucalyptus and OpenNebula were too tied to single vendors or lacking in scale. Having a multi-vendor, multi-contributor project without a dictatorial owner was a critical imperative for the community and it continues to be one of the most distinctive OpenStack traits.
Background 2: DefCore, The Community Interoperability Process
What is DefCore? The name DefCore is a portmanteau of the committee’s job to “define core” functions of OpenStack. The official explanation says “DefCore sets base requirements by defining 1) capabilities, 2) code and 3) must-pass tests for all OpenStack products. This definition uses community resources and involvement to drive interoperability by creating the minimum standards for products labeled OpenStack.” Fundamentally, it’s an OpenStack Board committee with membership open to the community. In very practical terms, DefCore picks which features and implementation details of OpenStack are required by the vendors; consequently, we’ve designed a governance process to ensure transparency and, hopefully, prevent individual vendors from exerting too much influence.
Rob Hirschfeld 