At the inaugural design summit for OpenStack, an open source set of technologies for building clouds, Nebula’s chief architect Josh McKenty played a prominent role in leading the assembled folks. I caught Josh during a break and chatted with him about Nebula and NASA’s role in the newly announced OpenStack project. Here’s what he had to say:
Some of the topics Josh tackles:
- What is Nebula (hint: NASA’s, primarily IaaS, cloud computing platform)
- The history of Nebula and how it morphed from nasa.net.
- Why NASA wants a cloud – and the importance of having an elastic set of resources.
- NASA and Nebula’s use of open source and how it has evolved (they don’t simply fling tarballs over the wall anymore and they can use licenses other than the “NASA open source agreement”)
- A match made in heaven: NASA has put together a strong compute platform and was looking to building a real object store, Rackspace had a strong object store and work looking for a new compute platform.
Extra-credit reading:
- Press Release: Rackspace Open Sources Cloud Platform; Plans to Collaborate with NASA and other Industry Leaders
- Blog: Introducing OpenStack — an open source cloud platform
- Blog: Talkin’ to the project lead of OpenStack Object Storage
- Blog: OpenStack Compute – talking to the chief architect
- HPC Wire: NASA Center for Climate Simulation Expands Research Capabilities with Dell HPC Technology
Pau for now…