OpenStack project co-founder NASA is to bow out of further development of the open source cloud platform. With the project picking up momentum, gaining support from industry giants such as Red Hat, IBM, AT&T and HP, the US space agency sees its role as co-developer as completed. Instead, it now intends to utilise the services of commercial cloud providers as a "smart consumer". NASA also plans to end its work on cloud computing project Nebula, which utilises OpenStack.

The OpenStack project was launched by NASA and Rackspace in 2010, with the aim of creating an open source platform as an alternative to proprietary cloud environments. The OpenStack community now encompasses more than a hundred companies. Development of OpenStack is to be transferred to a dedicated foundation later this year. As an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform, OpenStack makes both server and network infrastructure available 'in the cloud'. The latest version, Essex, was released last month. The source code is licensed under the Apache license.

(djwm)