NASA and Rackspace open source the cloud!

In 2008, NASA was interested in utilizing AWS EC2 to perform scientific computation, but had some concerns about security. As a result, they decided to build their own open-source cloud platform called Nebula. Nebula was a scalable compute-provisioning engine that was loosely based on the EC2 offering.

Around the same time, Rackspace, a managed hosting company from San Antonio, Texas, was working on an open source project called Swift. Swift was (and still is) a distributed object storage system similar to AWS S3, which became a part of Rackspace's Cloud Files offering.

It wasn't until July of 2010 that NASA and Rackspace officially announced the plan to actively combine the Nebula and Swift projects, inviting the world to begin contributing code to a new open source cloud project known as OpenStack. Discussions about the direction of OpenStack began immediately, as more than 100 architects and developers from more than 25 companies traveled to Austin for the first OpenStack conference. Just as quickly, hundreds of developers, hardware manufacturers, and IT software companies began contributing code, inspired by the OpenStack mission:

"To produce the ubiquitous Open Source Cloud Computing platform that will meet the needs of public and private clouds regardless of size, by being simple to implement and massively scalable."

This mission statement appeared on the wiki on May 24th, 2010 and still captures the long-term goal of the OpenStack community today.