At AT&T's Developer Summit in Las Vegas, company CTO John Donovan announced that the company had officially become a contributor to OpenStack, the open-source cloud architecture project that emerged from efforts by NASA and hosting company RackSpace. AT&T is the first telecom services provider to join OpenStack.

Donovan said that AT&T had been participating in the project for more than a year, and "has already contributed a blueprint for a potential new function within OpenStack, focused on transactional task management." AT&T already has three data centers running the OpenStack platform, and plans to double its open-source infrastructure this year.

AT&T announced the move as part of the unveiling of a new AT&T-hosted cloud product, AT&T Cloud Architect—which Donovan described as "a developer-centric cloud." The service will be focused on providing developers of cloud apps low-cost entry into AT&T's hosting services, and a choice of public or private access, as well as an option for "bare-metal" provisioning of hardware for developers requiring specific server configurations, and options for cloud storage, network configuration and monitoring.

Donovan didn't give details on what these options are, but said the service will become available in "the coming weeks." There was also little in way of actual details on the service's pricing plans, aside from mention of hourly or monthly billing options.