Dana Blankenhorn has been a journalist, writer and part-time futurist for over 30 years.
OpenStack, the open source cloud project built around a Rackspace API, has set some deadlines for development milestones.
The most important date is October 21.
That’s the day for delivering the company’s first release, dubbed Austin. This will be followed by a development conference scheduled for November 9-12 in San Antonio. (Nachos for everyone!)
Austin will include what is now called the RESTful API, based on the Rackspace API published last year under a Creative Commons license.
Jim Curry emphasized in his blog post this is not to dismiss Amazon’s EC2, support for which is already in the code base.
Austin will include support for multiple hypervisors, through a management system called libvirt. This includes XenServer, KVM, UML and VirtualBox, Curry wrote. Austin will also support either real or private IP addresses within a subnet, Curry confirmed.
Personally I find the biggest news to be the project’s hiring of a top tech writer, Anne Gentle. Anne has written the book about using social networks for documentation, and maintains her own blog at JustWriteClick.
Gentle is based in Austin, so I’m guessing the first code release is not named for character actor Austin Pendleton. (The original Motel the tailor in Fiddler on the Roof, back when Zero Mostel was the lead. True.)
Gentle will have an easy commute to Rackspace’s new headquarters in the former Windsor Park Mall, at I-35 and I-410. Critics called this a “bad part of town” when they took the project on but it’s just a few miles from Alamo Heights, San Antonio’s answer to University Place (surrounded by Houston) or Decatur (next to intown Atlanta).
The Rackspace headquarters is a good example of re-use, and that’s Gentle’s trip as well. She writes that her initial tasks include building a table on the project wiki to show where content lives, look for text re-use opportunities, and figure out who her readers are.
If all this makes OpenStack sound like Texas’ entrant in the cloud wars, you’re not far off. And, yes, I am wondering why Dell went after 3PAR when these guys are just down the road from Round Rock, less than 100 miles away in fact.
Texans will drive further than that for bar-b-q.
