Today’s announcement of a new OpenStack consortium, led by Rackspace and NASA, could help the cloud  computing movement quickly overcome user concerns regarding vendor lock-in by establishing a open-source platform to encourage industry standards for cloud interoperability.

While there will always be cynicism and debate about the feasibility of creating industry-wide technology standards, this initiative appears to have ‘legs’ for a number of reasons,

The initiative promotes the use of generally accepted Open Source stack technologies and approaches which are already popular in the cloud computing industry,
The strength and diversity of the ‘charter’ members of the OpenStack consortium represents a powerful group of technology vendors, service providers and enterprise users.

Although vendor/service provider deployment of the OpenStack code and technology may still vary based on the proprietary interpretations of the standards by specific companies, this initiative will still have a positive impact on the overall … Read More »