NASA backs open-source cloud platform

A new open-source project has launched today with the aim of developing standards for deploying cloud computing environments.

Cloud services provider Rackspace Hosting is spearheading the OpenStack project by releasing some of the code for its public cloud offerings. OpenStack is backed by NASA and more than 20 other technology providers.

Fabio Torlini, head of cloud at Rackspace EMEA, told V3.co.uk the company had been in talks with NASA about sharing cloud-related software code for some years.

"We have 80,000 customers using our cloud products, so they are proven stable and mature," he said. "As such, we believe there is a big opportunity in open source and that adoption will really take off once we have fully defined standards."

Rackspace has initially donated the code that powers its Cloud Files storage service to the first of the project's two components, a distributed object store called Object Storage.

The project will also incorporate technology that powers the NASA Nebula Cloud Computing Platform. Rackspace and NASA plan to actively collaborate on joint technology development and to use the efforts of open-source software developers worldwide.

Torlini confirmed that the Rackspace Cloud Servers offering will be added later this year to form the basis of the project's second component, OpenStack Compute.

This will provide a scalable compute-provisioning engine based on the NASA Nebula cloud technology.