OpenStack Turns 4 - The Top 4 OpenStack Articles in its Lifetime!

 It was recently mentioned this week on OpenStack's blog that OpenStack, the free and much-loved open source cloud computing platform, will turn 4 years old on July 19th, and they're declaring it a cause for celebration.

OpenStack celebrates its 4th birthday July 19, and we’re celebrating with the entire OpenStack community during July!  User maturity, software maturity and a focus on cloud software operations are rapidly emerging for OpenStack and none of it would be possible without the quickly growing OpenStack community. There are now more than 70 global user groups and 17,000 community members across 139 countries, spanning more than 370 organizations. This calls for a big toast to the OpenStack community members and our users.

At DZone, we've always been big supporters of OpenStack and that companies that bring it to its full potential--so we're going to be talking about OpenStack quite a bit up until their big day. And we hope that DZone readers will be talking about the cloud platform as well. To sort of kick things off in our look at OpenStack, I've collected the top four articles about OpenStack published on DZone in the last four years--during the OpenStack lifespan. This is just the tip of the iceberg!

1. Beginner's Guide to OpenStack: The Basics

"OpenStack (http://www.openstack.org/) is an OpenSource cloud computing platform that can be used to build up a Public and Private cloud. As in weaving of various technological components to provide a capability to build a cloud service supporting any use-case and scale.

Once upon a time RackSpace came into Cloud Services. In some parallel beautiful world, few Pythonistas at NASA started building there own Nova Cloud Compute to handle there own instances. RackSpace bought SliceHost which worked 'somewhat' fine. RackSpace came along with their Swift Object Storage Service and weaved in Nova with few more components around it. More other companies like HP, RedHat, Canonical  etc. came along to contribute and benefit from OpenSource cloud.

It's all Open it can be. Open Source. Open Design. Ope Development. Open Community."

2. Exploring Swift, the Software Behind OpenStack Object Storage Service

"Swift is the software behind the OpenStack Object Storage service. This service provides a simple storage service for applications using RESTful interfaces, providing maximum data availability and storage capacity.

I explain here how some parts of the storage and replication in Swift works, and show some of its current limitations. If you don't know Swift and want to read a more "shallow" overview first, you can read John Dickinson's Swift Tech Overview."

3. Openstack in a Box - Setting Up Devstack Havana On Your Local Network

"The Openstack project is hugely popular, gaining more and more ground with developers. It is also pretty damn complicated to set up.

Fortunately, the good folks as Openstack have set up an ‘all-in-one’ configuration allowing you to install all of the Openstack components on one machine using a fairly straightforward script. This project is called Devstack, and you can read more about is here."

4. Getting Started with OpenStack

"Why OpenStack?

Control and Flexibility
Open sourceplatform means you’re never locked to aproprietary vendor, and modular design canintegrate with legacy or third-partytechnologies to meet your business needs.

Scalability.
With massively scalable publicclouds in the petabyte storage range,OpenStack is already running in globalcorporations providing secure public andprivate cloud infrastructure.

Open Industry Standard
More than 75leading companies from over a dozencountries are participating in OpenStack,including Cisco, Citrix, Dell, Intel andMicrosoft, and new OpenStack clouds arecoming online across the globe.

Openness and Compatibility
Avoidproprietary vendor lock-in with Apachelicensed source code delivering compatibility with thousands of existing public andprivate clouds for seamless transition fromcloud to cloud.

Flexible Technology
Global ecosystem of industry leading vendors supply integrationsupport for a wide variety of features withinthe cloud. As an example, hypervisorsupport includes ESX, Hyper-V, KVM."

Stay tuned for more OpenStack related content through to their big day on July 19th!