NASA Created OpenStack, Dumped It, And Now Re-Embraces It

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab moves to OpenStack cloud platform, Fedscoop
“The NASA lab responsible for building the Mars rovers and robotic probes to scout the solar system has begun using an open-source cloud platform to house its mission-critical data. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab has retooled its existing hardware to support a Red Hat OpenStack cloud platform that will manage new flight projects, centralize research and reduce the need to keep funding legacy systems, according to Red Hat.”
Introducing OpenStack (2010), OpenStack Blog
“The good news is that OpenStack is starting with code contributions from two organizations that know how to build and run massively scalable clouds Rackspace and NASA. Rackspace has been in the cloud business for four years and now serves tens of thousands of customers on its cloud platform. Likewise, NASA began building their Nebula cloud platform two years ago to meet the needs of their scientific community.”
NASA Drops OpenStack For Amazon Cloud, Information Week (2012)
“NASA’s prestige and participation has been a selling point for advocates of the OpenStack open source cloud project, which NASA co-founded with San Antonio infrastructure-as-a-service provider RackSpace. Unfortunately, they’ll have to get along without NASA from here on. NASA has withdrawn as an active contributor to OpenStack, saying it doesn’t want to be in the business of producing cloud software anymore. Ray O’Brien, acting CIO at NASA Ames, when asked May 30 by InformationWeek about NASA’s participation, used diplomatic language to say that NASA still endorsed the project, was proud of its founding role, and might be a user of OpenStack components in the future. “It is very possible that NASA could leverage OpenStack as a customer in the future,” he wrote in his email response.”
–NASA Praises a Spinoff That It Has Already Dumped, Earlier post
– Paypal Adopts Software That NASA Developed and Then Dumped, Earlier post
– Earlier posts