On September 27, OpenStack released OpenStack 2012.2, also named Folsom.
OpenStack, the cloud computing project started by Rackspace and NASA in 2010, managed to release the project on schedule, as it was meant to be delivered before the OpenStack Design Summit, that will take place on October 15-18 in San Diego.
The Folsom release, which is the sixth version of the OpenStack software, was developed by about 350 open source developers, it counts with two new services, Networking (Quantum) and Block Storage (Cinder) and includes 185 new features to the project, especially focused in virtual networking.
While OpenStack gets ready for the summit, accomplishes to release on time its software and it is adding more companies in the project, Gartner is publishing a report warning to beware of the open source cloud computing project, and advises to better emply a third-party cloud management tool or API library that would be able to work with multiple clouds.
Lydia Leong, Gartner research VP, affirms that OpenStack has a lot of commercial interests behind and often vendors are involved for marketing reasons, it is also adviced to anyone who is thinking to adopt the open source software to take a close examination of the offering. According to the Gartner report Openstack is rescricting the ecosystem choices in hardware, management software, tools and libraries, due to its lack of significant market share.
Gartner research VP, also writes:
In reality, OpenStack is dominated by commercial interests, as it is a business strategy for the vendors involved, not the effort of a community of altruistic individual contributors. Some of the participants, notably Rackspace and other service providers are afraid of the growing dominance of AWS in the cloud IaaS market and do not believe that they have the ability to muster, on their own, the engineering resources necessary to successfully compete with AWS at scale, nor do they want to pay an ongoing license fee for a commercial CMP like VMware’s vCloud stack