Cloud-Practice. CloudStack. Golem.de. What is OpenStack. OpenStack is an open source infrastructure as a service (IaaS) initiative for creating and managing large groups of virtual private servers in a cloud computing environment. The goals of the OpenStack initiative are to support interoperability between cloud services and allow businesses to build Amazon-like cloud services in their own data centers. OpenStack, which is freely available under the Apache 2.0 license, is often referred to in the media as "the Linux of the Cloud" and is compared to Eucalyptus and the Apache CloudStack project, two other open source cloud initiatives.
OpenStack has a modular architecture that currently has three components: compute, storage and image service. OpenStack Compute - a cloud computing fabric controller for provisioning and managing large networks of virtual machines (VMs). The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) worked with Rackspace, a managed hosting and cloud computing service provider, to develop OpenStack. CloudUser.