Two open source projects that I’m proud to be a part of have just had major releases within days of each other.
There’s OpenStack, which powers the Rackspace open cloud, with its eagerly anticipated Folsom release. This release sees the introduction of the Network Service (Quantum) and Block Storage Service (Cinder) among many other additions and improvements. For an overview of all of the components and projects it’s tough to beat Ken Pepple’s OpenStack Folsom Architecture post. I made it onto the contributor list this time around for fixing a minor bug and it’s an honor to be on that list with so many great developers. To get an idea of the scope of contributions to OpenStack just spend some time Looking at the Numbers.
Then there’s jclouds, the Java cross-cloud toolkit with its release of their 1.5 branch. I’ve made a fair number of contributions to this project by improving the support for OpenStack and Rackspace. During that time I’ve become part of their community and have seen first hand the passion and commitment they have toward releasing a high quality toolkit. The jclouds user base is growing rapidly and it’s easy for me to see why.
To top it all off I get to present jclouds directly to the OpenStack community in a workshop titled Control the Clouds: Developer Experience with jclouds at the OpenStack Summit in San Diego. The workshop is on Thursday, October 18 at 3:20 pm. We’re going to be writing some writing some Java code to fire up some servers. If you’re attending the Summit, please join us!
Coda
So is it a coincidence that OpenStack and jclouds had major releases with days of each other? Yes, definitely, absolutely it was. But for me it was more like serendipity. These two great projects have truly come into their own and these releases are well deserved milestones on the road ahead.