The OpenStack Icehouse release debuted this week, providing users of the open-source cloud platform with a long list of new features.

OpenStack got its start back in July of 2010 as a joint open-source effort between Rackspace and NASA. OpenStack has since expanded to include the biggest names in the IT industry with IBM, Cisco, Dell, HP among the many organizations that support the open-source cloud effort.

Rackspace is already running OpenStack Icehouse to power its public cloud offering.

"We're always doing continuous integration and deployment into production, based on what's out there in the OpenStack community," John Engates, CTO of Rackspace, told Datamation. "We're basically running Icehouse in our public cloud."

Rackspace also has a private enterprise offering, which is not currently running Icehouse. Enterprise vendors, including Red Hat, tend to take additional time and measures to harden code before making it available for enterprise production usage.

"Our private cloud technology is more of a point in time release, rather than a continuous release cycle," Engates said. "It's a few weeks to a few months after an public OpenStack release until we our own private release, we're certainly not in a huge hurry there."

Read the full story at Datamation:

OpenStack Icehouse Moves Open-Source Cloud Forward

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.