After OpenStack was announced at OSCON in the summer of 2010, the degree of momentum behind this new open source platform has been nothing short of spectacular. Startups and enterprises alike have placed their strategic bets to monetize the OpenStack wave in various ways. As an ecosystem insider and one of the founding sponsors of the OpenStack Foundation, I wanted to offer my views on how various organizations are looking to skin this cat.
I’d like to focus on three of the many efforts currently underway. These three, in particular, happen to be the most vocal about their position and represent three distinct strategy camps. They are Nebula with its OpenStack appliance; Piston with its PentOS cloud operating system; and Dell’s Crowbar, an OpenStack installer.