Red Hat Releases Preview Version of Open Stack Distribution 37
hypnosec writes "Red Hat has announced the availability of a preview version of its OpenStack Distribution that would enable it to compete with the likes of Amazon which is considered one of the leaders in infrastructure-as-a-service cloud services. The enterprise Linux maker was a late entrant into the OpenStack world where players like Rackspace, HP and Internap have already made their mark. Red Hat's OpenStack distribution enterprises can build and manage private, public, and hybrid infrastructure-as-a-service clouds. These companies will not only be competing with the likes of Amazon, but will also be competing against themselves to get a bite out of the IaaS cloud. What started as a project has quickly developed into an open source solution that enables organizations to achieve performance, features and greater functionality from their private and/or public clouds. The announcement of OpenStack Foundation acted as a catalyst toward the fast-paced development of the platform."
Re:Distributed, libre cloud? (Score:2, Interesting)
OpenStack is the ability for organizations to offer the kinds of services that Amazon provides to internal (or even external) clients.
I have no proof one way or the other, but I'm convinced that Amazon got in to the "Cloud" business simply because they had already adopted the service and virtualization idiom for development and the infrastructure to support it internally for their own services, and then found they had a lot of idle hardware after the Christmas shopping rush. Opening up that spare hardware to the world to use was simply an attempt to monetize idle system using infrastructure they already had. I guess it turned out to be a pretty good idea in its own right. Who knew.
Deploying cloud services to internal clients for development, deployments, testing, marketing, etc. has show to be an efficient use of both hardware as well as human resources in terms of easier management. OpenStack is one of sets of infrastructure that makes the management of such systems easier, and includes capabilities such as auditing and billing so that costs can be better and more easily allocated to internal operation units.
Nothing sinister here.