Foreword

It’s difficult for me to believe that it’s already been five years since I was looking over the original source code of the Nova project. The code had just been released by the Anso Labs team who created it for NASA. Rackspace, where I worked at the time, was seeking a new code base to act as the next generation of the Rackspace Cloud. A few months later, Rackspace open-sourced the code for its Rackspace Cloud Files platform as the Swift project. Nova and Swift became the first two pillars of the nascent OpenStack project.

Since that time, both projects have undergone substantial change. Swift’s core team and code base have remained remarkably stable, though the project has added a number of features and seen numerous enhancements in performance and scalability. On the other hand, when compared with its humble beginnings, Nova’s source code is nearly unrecognizable. New code bases like Glance, Cinder, Keystone, and Neutron were constructed to deliver functionality that originally was handled by Nova.

At the same time that this new source code emerged to handle functionality essential to managing large computing infrastructure, a new kind of open source community was beginning to take form. Open source developers and advocates with experience in operating system distribution and packaging, configuration management, database design, automation, networking, and storage systems flocked to contribute to OpenStack projects.