Yesterday Rackspace and Intel jointly announced the “OpenStack Innovation Center.” OpenStack is, of course, the open source cloud operating system launched five or so years ago by Rackspace and NASA. Since then it has grown up and now has its own foundation, massive industry buy-in and robust, stable code. So what are these two vendors doing that will change anything? According to the companies, the innovation center will provide two 1,000-node clusters to test out new features geared for large, enterprise deployments.
Bear in mind that in the past week we have had a number of initiatives announced or expanded. We had the Cloud Native computing Forum, a Google-initiated program which itself has pretty broad industry buy-in. It is, at face value, focused on increasing the consistency of management platforms for cloud-native applications. It wants to make it easier for organizations to build, deploy, and manage cloud-scale apps. The subtext (and, yes, there generally is a subtext) is that Google knows full well that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the king of the crowd in the public cloud and it sees the Kubernetes open source container management system as a sort of Trojan Horse that will help it gain some momentum in the field. It was noticeable that AWS wasn’t a part…
