OpenStack is a global collaboration of developers and cloud computing technologists that seeks to produce a ubiquitous Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) open source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds. OpenStack was founded by Rackspace Hosting and NASA jointly in July 2010 -since then, 160 companies and close to 3,000 developers have joined the project.

At the OpenStack 2011 Conference in Boston, Rackspace made clear its intention to form an OpenStack Foundation in 2012, which will be responsible for project governance and ownership of the OpenStack trademark. This marks a major milestone in the evolution of OpenStack as an open movement to establish the industry standard for open source cloud capability. On April 12th, 2012, the formation of the OpenStack Foundation was announced, including news that IBM has joined as a Platinum Sponsor.

[ We’ll be continuing this conversation on Twitter today during #cloudchat from 4-5 p.m. ET. Join me (@angelluisdiaz) and Rackspace leaders in real-time by simply following and tagging your tweets with the hashtag #cloudchat (Twebevent is a tool that makes it easy to participate, you can also get more details on participating here.) Feel free to send us your questions and comments using the hashtag. ]

IBM joining OpenStack may not come as a complete surprise. IBM signed the OpenStack contributor’s agreement in February and has been busy working on contributions to the community. We’ve seen this before. Similar to many major technology trends, standards and open source accelerate the adoption of technology and increase the value our clients obtain from that technology. This was evident in the advent of the World Wide Web and continued through the evolution of the web application server, J2EE, and service oriented architecture, just to name a few. The combination of standards and open source has been a powerful catalyst.

Take the W3C eXtensible Markup Language (XML) as an example. IBM’s contribution in 1999 of the Apache Xerces XML parser and processor helped to kick-start one of the most important standards for the Web. The wide-spread adoption of both the standard and implementation made it easy for developers to focus on application logic and not worry about the details of data formats and parser implementations. This implementation experience helped us improve the standards and open source implementation, thus providing a valuable feedback loop. So while IBM has a strong reputation centered on the enterprise, we have been strong contributors to the growth of important innovations for the Web and we hope to continue this legacy, as we support the OpenStack Foundation.

IBM’s initial focus is going to be:

1 Establish the OpenStack Foundation

2. Support and expand the OpenStack Ecosystem

3. Contribute to the OpenStack Development

1. Establish the OpenStack Foundation

IBM will contribute to the formation of the OpenStack Foundation — an independent body providing shared resources to help achieve the OpenStack Mission by Protecting, Empowering, and Promoting OpenStack software and the community around it, including users, developers and the entire ecosystem.

2. Support and expand the OpenStack Ecosystem

Another important ingredient for successful standards and open source actives need to be user-driven based on real world use cases. This is why, for the past year, IBM has been working closely with the members of the Cloud Standards Customer Council (CSCC) to identify the requirements and use cases that matter most to Cloud consumers, and we’ve used that input to help us focus on the emerging Cloud standards and features that matter most to our customers.

Among the key requirements that the members of the CSCC have articulated are interoperability, portability and flexibility. They have made it abundantly clear that open standards and open source reference implementations are a key enabler for Cloud solutions that deliver on those requirements. As part of the OpenStack Foundation there is going to be a very overt focus on end users with the formation of an OpenStack User Committee, charged with ensuring the voice of the end-user is front and center.

3. Contribute to the OpenStack Development

One of the key requirements we hear repeatedly from customers is the need for standards that enable portability and interoperability of data, so that they can either migrate their applications from one environment to another, or that they may take advantage of hybrid cloud scenarios, without needing to retool. Standards-based interfaces are key to delivering value towards that requirement. CDMI is one of the emerging cloud standards that we believe addresses basic needs for cloud object storage capability, and that will enable such use cases.

We have been working on an implementation of an important cloud storage interface standard for OpenStack: SNIA‘s Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI). CDMI defines the functional interface that applications will use to create, retrieve, update and delete data objects from the Cloud. As part of this interface, the client will be able to discover the capabilities of the cloud storage offering and use this interface to manage the containers and the data that is placed in them.

In addition, metadata used to describe containers and objects can be set through this interface. The CDMI interface is also used by administrative and management applications to manage containers, accounts, security access and monitoring/billing information, even for storage that is accessible by other protocols. The capabilities of the underlying storage and data services are exposed so that clients can understand the offering.

As part of expanding the value of CDMI, and in the spirit of helping OpenStack expand its interoperability footprint, IBM has submitted a “blueprint” to the OpenStack Object Storage (Swift) project that proposes to add support for the CDMI adaptor specification without impacting existing Swift users.

We designed the CDMI implementation on OpenStack Swift as a filter, such that the implementation can be easily configured to run like any other modules in Swift’s pipeline. It also takes advantages of the Swift authentication filter so that the CDMI implementation modules can be completely independent of other modules.

Of the many concepts in the CDMI specification, the two most important and relevant to Swift are the container and data object. Thus, we chose to start with the support for container, data object and capability aspects of the CDMI specification. When the CDMI implementation is not needed, you can tweak the Swift configuration to disable it.

Looking out even further, we envision standards such as OASIS TOSCA for cloud workload interoperability, and the W3C LinkedData & OSLC that connect applications together for continuous delivery being grounded in the OpenStack experience.

IBM plans to be a significant contributor to the OpenStack Foundation. We will contribute to the open source projects, provide resources to help shape and promote the organization and provide sponsorship funding for ongoing operations. IBM has a proven history of contributing to open source and open standards development. Extensive experience in cloud offerings for our clients as well as a portfolio of intellectual assets that we can share with the open source project will bring operational robustness to the OpenStack platform.

We’re just getting started. By contributing to the community, we hope to become a trusted and valued member. Our long-term goal is to help the platform develop and sustain a vibrant, innovative ecosystem and become a platform of choice to build upon, much like Apache HTTP server, Apache Axis and Linux. It’s about accelerating the OpenStack movement from inflection point to business as usual.

For more information about the history of OpenStack, see Wired Enterprise’s The Secret History of OpenStack, the Free Cloud Software That’s Changing Everything.