In the two months since Enstratius became part of the Dell Software systems management offerings, our engineering team has been heads down, continuing to execute on the roadmap around which we built the company. The most immediate impacts of the acquisition have arrived in the form of scale—we’ve grown the team by 50% and we’ve doubled down on the Open Source soul of Enstratius, Dasein Cloud.
From the perspective of the Enstratius team, one of the most alluring aspects of the acquisition by Dell was how strongly the Dell cloud computing vision aligned with our existing features and roadmap. Dell didn’t want us to change a thing about our roadmap—just to speed it up. The primary objective was thus to make everything happen faster so Enstratius could form the basis of a larger cloud computing strategy.
To the Open Source community, the most exciting component of the acquisition is Dasein Cloud. Dasein Cloud is the cloud abstraction layer around which Dell Multi-Cloud Manager is built. Dasein Cloud simplifies the challenge of interacting with all of the very different cloud environments that exist by providing a common representation of those clouds along with their capabilities. In 2010, Enstratius released this abstraction under the Apache Software License. Over the course of the last year, we’ve been actively encouraging community involvement. We were just starting to see the fruits of the community building efforts as the acquisition closed.
In short, Dasein Cloud is absolutely critical to Dell Multi-Cloud Manager. The architecture enables Dell to rapidly add support for new clouds—with more than 20 cloud environments supported today—and it creates a framework around which Dell Multi-Cloud Manager can be an honest broker across all of these clouds. Dasein Cloud is thus a strategic part of the Enstratius acquisition and Dell has begun investing in resources to accelerate the development of Dasein Cloud and grow the community. Among the things we have done so far:
- Added a number of new developers focused on Dasein Cloud development
- Added more resources for building out the Dasein Cloud community
- Re-designed the dasein.org web site to have more up-to-date content
- Added support for interactive HipChat support for the Dasein Cloud community
- Engaged with a number of partners to sponsor specific cloud implementations for Dasein Cloud
Community is vital to the future of Dasein Cloud. Individuals and developers from companies large and small are contributing to the development of support for the core interfaces, AWS integration, OpenStack, and proprietary private clouds. Developers using Dasein Cloud to interact with multiple clouds have access to a rich test suite for validating support for their cloud.
To use Dasein Cloud in your own project or to get engaged contributing to Dasein Cloud, visit http://www.dasein.org. Or, if you’ll be at OSCON this week, please visit us at booth #719 where we’ll have experts on hand to speak with you about Dell Multi-Cloud Manager and Dasein, among other open source initiatives and solutions Dell is leading. You can also join our OSCON session on Thursday, July 25 at 2:30 p.m.: Must Haves for your Cloud Toolbox: Driving to DevOps with Crowbar and Dasein.