Last week we launched a survey to collect feedback from our community regarding what is their preferred interface for cloud consumers and how we should invest our resources in cloud API enhancement and development. The survey was open for two days receiving feedback from almost 200 OpenNebula clouds.

Targeted to OpenNebula cloud administrators, our aim was firstly to have information about the level of use of the two cloud APIs offered now by OpenNebula, namely AWS and OGF OCCI. The results show that:

• 38% do not expose cloud APIs, their users only interface through the Sunstone GUI
• 36% mostly use the AWS API
• 26% mostly use the OpenNebula’s OCCI API or the OCCI API offered by rOCCI

Then we asked how they would like us to invest our resources to enhance the Cloud APIs. The results show that:

• 47% to enhance the existing AWS API implementation
• 21% to enhance the existing OGF OCCI implementation
• 10% to implement the OpenStack API
• 10% to implement the vCloud API
• 6% to implement the Google Cloud API
• 6% to implement the DMTF CIMI API

We also received many valuable additional comments mostly stating that “AWS is the de-facto standard and an executive-friendly selling point”, “OGF’s OCCI is the only independent community-driven standard”, “OpenStack API is still not stable and fully documented”, and “Google Cloud API represents a big opportunity in the medium term”.

Guided by these results, our plans for the near future are to enhance and extend our implementation of the AWS API and to offer OCCI compatibility through the rOCCI component. Of course, if your organization is interested in implementing one the less demanded Cloud APIs, we can provide you with the needed support.

Thanks a lot for your feedback!

The OpenNebula Project is proud to announce that the first ever OpenNebula Global Conference will be held in Berlin from the 24th to the 26th of September 2013. The Conference will serve as a meeting point for OpenNebula cloud users, developers, administrators, builders, integrators and researchers and a unique opportunity for discussion and collaboration with other projects. This event is all about enabling the next generation platform for enterprise cloud computing and data center virtualization, and will focus on:

• Discussing the latest technology updates, roadmap, and features
• Supporting the developers community
• Presenting use cases and deployment experiences
• Introducing new integrations and ecosystem developments
• Collaborating with other open-source projects and communities

In few weeks we will announce the line-up of keynote speakers.

CALL FOR PROPOSALS IS NOW OPEN

The agenda will consist of 45-minute slots for invited keynote speakers and accepted submissions. If you are a OpenNebula practitioner, user, architect, devop, admin or developer and have something important to share, we welcome your submission. Suggested topics include:

• Latest developments in OpenNebula
• Research using OpenNebula
• User experiences and case studies using OpenNebula
• Best practices and tools
• Integration with other cloud, virtualization and data center components
• Any other topics that you feel are relevant to developers, users, researchers and other members of the community

All submissions must be received before midnight June 15, 2013 CEST. Please submit all needed information using our submission form.

You will receive a notification whether or not your presentation proposal was accepted by June 30th.

CALL FOR SPONSORS IS NOW OPEN

Sponsoring OpenNebulaConf is a great chance to present your company with the leading open source datacenter virtualization solution on the market. For information on sponsorship opportunities you can visit the conference site. We offer a wide range of sponsorship opportunities to allow you to choose a package that suits your marketing needs. We’ll happily work with you to find a sponsorship that fits your needs.

ABOUT OPENNEBULA

The OpenNebula Project is an open-source project delivering the most feature-rich, customizable and open solution to build enterprise clouds and virtualized data centers. With thousands of deployments worldwide, OpenNebula has a very wide user base that includes leading companies in banking, technology, telecom and hosting, and research and supercomputing centers.

NETWAYS GmbH has just announced its partnership with C12G Labs to provide services, consulting, and private- and hybrid-cloud-services based on OpenNebula. NETWAYS has been an active promoter of OpenNebula and a collaborator of C12G Labs since 2011 when they organized the first OpenNebula Workshop at OSDC 2011 in Nuremberg. NETWAYS and C12G shared an Exhibition Stand in the Open Source Park at CeBIT 2013.

NETWAYS has been supporting companies to manage complex, multifaceted IT infrastructures for more than 15 years. Specializing in enterprise grade open source tools, they ensure the smooth operation of networks, servers and applications. NETWAYS has chosen OpenNebula for its implementation of standards, efficiency, availability, and scalability. NETWAYS has been successfully using OpenNebula in various production environments for several years.

More information in the NETWAYS press release.

We described in a previous post our experience about the different types of cloud models, and our view about how the main open-source Cloud Management Platforms (CMPs) are targeting their needs. Our aim was to demonstrate that we will see an open-source cloud space with several offerings focused on different environments and/or industries, due to the fact that no single CMP can be all things to all people. The four open-source CMPs will coexist and, in some cases, work together in a broad open cloud ecosystem.

This article tries to answer another quite common question in open-source cloud computing discussions and presentations… which CMP is the most open? Of course such analysis should go beyond just considering the openness of the code (which as far as we know is fully open-source in the four projects) and the development process to additionally address the perspectives of the consumers and the builders of the cloud infrastructure.

In this comparison we refer to the version of the software that is available for download directly from the respective project web sites. As in our previous post, we have tried to be as neutral as possible.

The Perspective of the Developer

What is “open” and how can we measure project openness under the perspective of a corporation interested in contributing to code development?. We would suggest to use the following measures:

• Development Model: Is the code developed over the Internet in view of the public?
• Developer Engagement: Is the development open to external contributions?
• Governance Model: How are the decisions about roadmap made?

The four CMPs are fully open-source software, accept contributions under similar license agreements, and are publicly developed over the Internet. However, there is a difference in their governance models. While OpenStack follows a foundation approach with a Board of Directors providing strategic oversight and CloudStack follows the Apache meritocracy rules, Eucalyptus and OpenNebula are managed by a single organization that focuses on the interest of the project and strategically leads it to ensure that it meets the needs of the users and the community. Benevolent dictator governance is the model followed by other successful projects like Android or Linux Kernel, and, in our view, it is the most effective way to focus on engineering quality, to be responsive to the users, and to ensure long term support.

The Perspective of the User

Let us now evaluate openness under the perspective of the user. In this case, we should consider both the perspective of the user of the cloud (consumer) and the perspective of the user of the technology (builder).

• From the perspective of the cloud consumer, “open cloud” is all about APIs and data formats. Common API’s give freedom to run anywhere, being this freedom supported or not by open source. This provides the ability for the user to compare cloud offerings, select the offer that best suits his needs, and change providers if he is unsatisfied with the service or finds a more competitive offering.
• From the perspective of the cloud builder, “open cloud” means that the community open-source software is enterprise-grade and commercially supported without having to install a vendor enhanced distribution (which would be much closer to an “open core model”). This is where technology buyers and users can evaluate openness for themselves.

From the perspective of the user, we would suggest to use the following measures:

• API Ecosystem: Is the software supporting a de-facto standard with a broad ecosystem?
• Production Readiness: Is the open-source software ready for enterprise use and commercially supported?

No much more to say about cloud API ecosystems, we do not want to start a new discussion about which of the cloud APIs is a de-facto standard and which ecosystem is bigger and growing faster  (please see addendum 2). Production Readiness is a very interesting aspect which deserves a detailed discussion. Independently of whether the software is being used for development or for production purposes, it is understood that a corporation needs the open-source cloud management platform to be enterprise ready, which means to be stable, long-term commercially supported, and with a clear upgrade process.

From this perspective, it is clear that Eucalyptus and OpenNebula are more open. Both projects provide an enterprise-ready open-source cloud solution. Any organization can use the open-source distribution to build a production cloud, and receive best-effort support through a community mailing list. Additionally, any organization can purchase commercial support directly from the developers. The important aspect is that these projects do not deliver enterprise editions of their software, they commercially support the community software. In other words, the community versions of Eucalyptus and OpenNebula are not limited editions of enterprise versions. CloudStack could be also included in this group, given that Citrix CloudPlatform is basically an enterprise distribution that (as far as we know) does not provide extended features.

On the other side, any organization interested in using OpenStack, and requiring commercial support and enterprise maturity, is recommended (please see addendum 1) to deploy any of the several enterprise distributions that are being released by the vendors contributing to the project. These enterprise-grade distributions incorporate different versions of the OpenStack components with extended features, custom enhancements and integrations that may make difficult their compatibility and interoperability. Moreover many of them include proprietary components and exhibit significant differences in the implementation of critical underlying functionality. So the organization is finally using proprietary software based on OpenStack and is locked to that specific distribution given that the vendor only supports its own stack, not the community version, and there is no way to migrate to another vendor distribution.

Looking to the Future

We have not prepared this article to try to demonstrate that one of the CMPs is more open than the others. We have tried to show how the four open source projects have different cultures and drivers, and these differences are reflected in the different dimensions of openness. For example, the four CMPs implement different governance models because they are addressing different needs. While Eucalyptus and OpenNebula serve the needs of the users, CloudStack better serves the needs of the developers, and OpenStack serves the needs of the vendors, so they have a technology base and a marketing brand to build their own cloud stacks.

Which is the most important measure of openness in cloud computing? Do the cloud users really care about this? Users mainly want a solution that meets their functional needs, and are interested in open-source as a way to enhance flexibility, lower costs and avoid lock-in. However, in our experience, most of these benefits are only available when an open-source software can be used in production environments without the addition of proprietary components.

Addendum 1 (14:41 PDT, March 14, 2013): This is not a personal recommendation. This is a recommendation made by several of the companies involved in OpenStack that have released, or are planing to release in the short term, an enterprise-ready OpenStack distribution. According to their different announcements, these vendor specific distributions bring production-grade features like upgrade services, scalability, performance, or stability.

Addendum 2 (23:23 PDT, March 14, 2013): I forgot to include some words about the support of the four open-source cloud management stacks to existing de-jure standards addressing interoperability and portability issues surrounding cloud infrastructures. Although they do not have a broad ecosystem now, they will be critical in future cloud interoperability and portability. The OpenNebula main distribution provides an implementation of OGF OCCI and in its ecosystem there are implementations of DMTF CIMI and OVF, and SNIA CDMI, and OpenStack also offers an experimental implementation of OGF OCCI.

Over the last five years, since the release of the first open-source version of OpenNebula in March 2008, we have been involved in many presentations, discussions and meetings where people wanted to know how OpenNebula compares with the rest of open-source Cloud Management Platforms (CMPs), mostly with Eucalyptus and OpenStack. The most common understanding is that all CMPs are competing in the same market, trying to fill the same gap. Consequently, people jump to the wrong conclusion that after years of a fierce competition, there will only be one winner, a single open-source CMP in the market. However, as discussed by Joe Brockmeier in his post “It’s Not Highlander, There Can Be More Than One Open Source Cloud”, there is room in the market for several open-source CMPs that, addressing different cloud niches, will fit together into a broad open cloud ecosystem.

We have prepared this article to briefly describe our experience about the different types of cloud models, and our view about how the main open-source CMPs are targeting their needs. Do not expect a table comparing side-by-side the size of the communities, technical features of the different tools, or the management structure of the projects. We have tried to focus only on their general approaches, on their overall position in the cloud market, and, of course we have tried to be as neutral as possible.

Two Different Cloud Models

Although there are as many ways to understand cloud computing as there are organizations planning to build a cloud, they mostly fall between two extreme cloud models:

• Datacenter Virtualization: On one side, there are businesses that understand cloud as an extension of virtualization in the datacenter; hence looking for a vCloud-like infrastructure automation tool to orchestrate and simplify the management of the virtualized resources.
• Infrastructure Provision: On the other side, there are businesses that understand cloud as an AWS-like cloud on-premise; hence looking for a provisioning tool to supply virtualized resources on-demand.

Yes, we know, we said that we wanted to focus only on open-source CMPs. However we have intentionally used two of the principal cloud “products”, VMware vCloud and AWS, a proprietary CMP and a cloud service, because they are the most well known implementations of both models. We will go even a step ahead and claim that most of the users in the first cloud model explicitly express their willingness to find an open alternative to vCloud because it is too expensive, because they want to avoid vendor lock-in, or because it cannot be adapted to meet their needs. Equally, users in the second cloud model explicitly mention Amazon as the type of cloud they want to build internally.

The following table describes the main characteristics of both types of clouds. This is not an exhaustive list, I’m just putting it here to illustrate some of the differences between both philosophies.

This classification of existing cloud models is not new. The “Datacenter Virtualization” and “Infrastructure Provider” cloud models have received different names by different authors: “Enterprise Cloud” and “Next Generation Cloud” by many analysts, “Cloud-in” and “Cloud-out” by Lydia Leong, “Enterprise Cloud “and “Open Cloud” by Randy Bias, “Enterprise Cloud” and “Private Cloud” by Simon Wardley, “Private Cloud” and “Public Cloud” by Matt Asay, and “Policy-based Clouds” and “Design for fail Clouds” by Massimo Re Ferrè, who also categorized these models as “Design Infrastructure to support Applications” versus “Design Applications that leverage Infrastructures”.

Two Different Flavors of Cloud Management Platforms

Existing open-source CMPs can be placed somewhere in between both models. We have created a chart, the CMP Quadrant, aiming to aid corporations to better understand the present and future landscape of the cloud market. One of the dimensions is the “Cloud Model” and the second one represents “Flexibility” in terms of the capabilities of the product to adapt to datacenter services and to be customized to provide a differentiated cloud service. This dimension captures the grade of adaptability of the product, and goes from low to high. Finally, we have placed in the chart the main open-source players in the cloud ecosystem: Eucalyptus, CloudStack, OpenStack and OpenNebula… or at least those tools that are commonly compared to OpenNebula by our users and customers.

Some important clarifications,

• We are not suggesting that one position (read “tool”) in the chart is better than other, only that some of the CMPs are so different that cannot be compared, they are on completely different tracks (read “zones in the Quadrant”).
• The chart does not represent absolute values, the relevant information is in the relative positions of the CMPs with respect to their “Cloud Model” and “Flexibility”.
• The openness of the software is orthogonal to this chart, you can also use it to compare proprietary CMPs.
• Any CMP can be used to build either public or private clouds, all of the CMPs in the Quadrant implement cloud APIs.
• And last, but not least, this map is not static, the different CMPs will move right, left, up or down over time, but they cannot be simultaneously in different places. There is not a single perfect solution for every possible scenario.

Comparing vCloud to AWS or comparing vCloud to OpenStack is like comparing apples to oranges as it has been clearly expressed by Massimo Re Ferrè and Boris Renski respectively. Both are fruits but with very different flavor. That being said, it is clear that since all the tools enable infrastructure cloud computing, there is always some overlap in the features that they provide. This overlap tends to be larger for those tools that are closer on the “Cloud Model” axis.

There are fundamental differences in philosophy and target market between OpenNebula and Eucalyptus They are in opposite zones of the Quadrant servicing different needs and implementing completely different philosophies. I would say that they represent the open-source incarnations closer to vCloud and AWS respectively. In the same way many companies compare OpenNebula with OpenStack because both represent flexible solutions that can be adapted to their needs, but wrongly think that both enable the same type of cloud. It is also clear that Eucalyptus and OpenStack meet the same need and so compete for the same type of cloud.

Looking to the Future

In OpenNebula, we do not think that one cloud model will dominate over the other. They may converge at the very long term, but not before 10 years. Consequently, and because a single CMP can not be all things to all people, we will see an open-source cloud space with several offerings focused on different environments and/or industries. This will be the natural evolution, the same happened in other markets. The four open-source CMPs will coexist and, in some cases, work together in a broad open cloud ecosystem.

To a certain extent, this collaboration has started yet. Some of our users have reported experiences using OpenNebula with other cloud platforms:

• Some corporations are mixing an Enterprise Cloud with an in-house Cloud Service. They are implementing a cloudbursting architecture where an OpenNebula enterprise cloud bursts to an OpenStack- or Eucalyptus-based cloud when the demand for computing capacity spikes.
• Other corporations are using components from different projects to build their cloud. The integration capabilities of OpenNebula are allowing its integration with OpenStack Swift or OpenStack Quantum for object/block store and networking management respectively in the data center.

We are sure that in the short term we will see some of the open-source CMPs working together, while at the same time finding ways to differentiate themselves in their own cloud markets.

The December 2012 issue of the IEEE Computer Magazine includes an article entitled “IaaS Cloud Architecture: From Virtualized Datacenters to Federated Cloud Infrastructures” that presents an architecture reference model for IaaS clouds, introduces the cloud OS (Operating System) as the core component of this architecture, and discusses the different approaches for cloud federation. The article mentions OpenNebula as an open-source reference implementation of the cloud OS platform that is responsible for managing the physical and virtual infrastructure, orchestrating and commanding service provisioning and deployment, and providing federation capabilities for accessing and deploying virtual resources in remote cloud infrastructures.

Enjoy the article!

Time flies, and we are approaching the end of another successful year at OpenNebula!. We’ve had a lot to celebrate around here during 2012, including our fifth anniversary. We took that opportunity to look back at how the project has grown in the last five years. We are extremely happy with the organic growth of the project. It’s five years old, it’s parked in some of the biggest organizations out there, and that all happened without any investment in marketing, just offering the most innovative and flexible open-source solution for data center virtualization and enterprise cloud management. An active and engaged community, along with our focus on solving real user needs in innovative ways and the involvement of the users in a fully vendor-agnostic project, constitute, in our view, the OpenNebula’s recipe to success.

As 2012 draws to and end, we’d like to review what this year has meant for the OpenNebula project and give you a peek at what you can expect from us in 2013. You have all the details about the great progress that we have seen for the OpenNebula project in our monthly newsletters.

Technology

During 2012, we have worked very hard to continue delivering the open-source industry standard to build and manage enterprise clouds, providing sysadmins and devops with an enterprise-grade data center virtualization platform that adapts to the underlying processes and models for computing, storage, security, monitoring, and networking. The Project has released 4 updates of the software: 3.2, 3.4, 3.6  and 3.8  within a rapid release cycle aimed at accelerating the transfer of innovation to the market. These new releases have incorporated full support for VMware, a whole slew of new computing, storage, network, user, accounting and security management features in the core, and many improvements to Sunstone, Self-service, oZones, and the AWS and OCCI interfaces. Thanks to this innovation, OpenNebula brings the highest levels of flexibility, stability, scalability and functionality for virtualized data centers and enterprise clouds in the open-source domain.

The roadmap of these releases was completely driven by users needs with features that meet real demands, and not features that resulted from an agreement between IT vendors planning to create their own proprietary cloud solution. Most of the OpenNebula contributors are users of the software, mostly sysadmins and devops, that have developed new innovative features from their production environments. We want to give a big two thumbs up to Research in Motion, Logica, China Mobile, STAKI LPDS, Terradue 2.0, CloudWeavers, Clemson University, Vilnius University, Akamai, Atos, FermiLab, and many other community members for their amazing contributions to OpenNebula. During 2012, we have tried to keep updated the list of people that have contributed to OpenNebula during the last five years. Send us an email if we forgot to include your name on the list.

We also announced the release of the new OpenNebula Marketplace, an online catalog where individuals and organizations can quickly distribute and deploy virtual appliances ready-to-run on OpenNebula clouds. Any user of an OpenNebula cloud can find and deploy virtual appliances in a single click. The OpenNebula marketplace is also of interest to software developer looking to quickly distribute a new appliance, making it available to all OpenNebula deployments worldwide. OpenNebula is fully integrated with the new OpenNebula Marketplace. Any user of an OpenNebula cloud can very easily find and deploy virtual appliances through familiar tools like the Sunstone GUI or the OpenNebula CLI.

Additionally, a set of  contextualization packages have been developed to aid in the contextualization of guest images by OpenNebula, smoothing the process of preparing images to be used in an OpenNebula cloud. We have also extended the mechanisms offered to try out OpenNebula. The Project now provides several Sanboxes with OpenNebula 3.8 preinstalled for VirtualBox, KVM, VMware ESX and Amazon EC2, and simple how-to guides for CentOS and VMware, and for CentOS and KVM.

It is also worth emphasizing the aspects that makes OpenNebula the platform of choice for the enterprise cloud: it is a production-ready software, easy to integrate with third party tools, and with unique features for the management of enterprise clouds. In 2012, C12G announced several releases of the OpenNebulaPro distribution: 3.2, 3.4, 3.6  and 3.8, and the brand-new OpenNebulaApps suite, a suite of tools for users and administrators of OpenNebula to simplify and optimize cloud application management. OpenNebulaPro provides the rapid innovation of open-source, with the stability and long-term production support of commercial software. C12G also announced new training sessions and jumpstart packages.

2013 will bring important changes in the Release Strategy and Quality Assurance Process of the project that will make OpenNebula even more enterprise-ready and community-friendly.  All of the benefits of the OpenNebulaPro distribution, as a more stable and certified distribution of OpenNebula, will be incorporated into OpenNebula and so publicly available for the community.

The Team is now focused on the upcoming 4.0 release that will bring many new features which will come in very handy for the day to day enterprise cloud management, including improvements in SunStone facelift and usability, enhancements in the core with audit trails or new states in the the virtual machine lifecycle, or support for disk snapshots and RBD block devices.

Community

Many people and organizations have contributed in different ways to the project, from the expertise and dedication of our core committers and hundreds of contributors to the valuable feedback of our thousands of users.  Some of our users and contributors have reached us with valuable testimonials, expressing their opinion of OpenNebula and the reasons of their choice over other cloud manager platforms. These testimonials include opinions by industry and research leaders like China Mobile, Dell, IBM, Logica, FermiLab, CERN, European Space Agency and SARA. We are looking forward to hearing from you!.

During 2012, we have seen a truly remarkable growth in the number of organizations and projects using OpenNebula, and many leading companies and research centers were added to our list of featured users: CITEC, LibreIT, Tokyo Institute of Technology, CloudWeavers, IBERGRID, MeghaCloud, NineLab, ISMB , RENKEI, BrainPowered, Dell, Liberologico, Impetus, OnGrid, Payoda, Cerit-CS, BAIDU, RJMetrics, RUR, MIMOS… Send us an email if  you would like to see your organization or project on the list of featured users.

An interesting study was published by C12G Labs, resulting from a survey among 820 users with a running OpenNebula cloud. The results stated that  43% of the deployments are in industry and 17% in research centers, KVM at 42% and VMware at 27% are the dominant hypervisors, and Ubuntu at 31% and CentOS at 26% are the most widely used linux distributions for OpenNebula clouds.

“Because it simply works” was the most frequent answer to the question “Why would you recommend OpenNebula to a colleague?” that we made to our users in a short survey that tells us how we are doing. Other frequent answers were “Because it is easy to install, maintain and update” or  “Because it is easy to customize”. “Rich functionality and stability” and “support for VMware” are also frequently mentioned by the survey respondents.

Several new components have been contributed to the OpenNebula ecosystem: Carina, CLUES,  a new version of Hyper-V drivers (result of our collaboration with Microsoft), Green Cloud Scheduler, Onenox, OpenVZ drivers, Contrail’s Virtual Execution Platform, one-ovz-driver, and a new OpenNebula driver in Deltacloud. We would like to highlight RIM’s contribution of Carina. The Carina project was motivated by the need to speed up the deployment of services onto the OpenNebula private cloud at RIM, it is a successful attempt to standardize the process for automating multi-VM deployments and setting auto-scaling and availability management policies in the cloud. We are looking forward to other upcoming contributions, like the components that China Mobile is developing for its Big Cloud Elastic Computing System. Regarding implementation of standards, new versions of rOCCI have been released to provide OpenNebula with a fully compliant OGF OCCI API.

Thanks also to our community, OpenNebula is now part of the repositories of the main Linux distributions: OpenSUSE, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu and CentOS. Moreover, there is a new book on OpenNebula and people from many organizations like Puppet Labs, IBM, China Mobile and RIM, or projects like FutureGrid have contributed new guides and experiences to our blog. One of the benefits of having a truly international community is that several users have been able to contribute partial and complete translations of OpenNebula’s user-facing interfaces. We started using Transifex to help us manage these translations, we also want to give a big thumbs up to our community for the translation efforts. Sunstone and Self-service are available in 9 different languages, and more are underway, making a total of 17!.

We also want to highlight a very special mention of OpenNebula by Neelie Kroes, VP of the European Commission and Comissioner for Digital Agenda, during a talk about how the EU is supporting Open ICT systems, namely open-source, open-procurement, and open-data.

In the coming year, we will continue our collaboration  with other communities and will launch new initiatives to support our wide community of users and developers, and the ecosystem of open-source components and innovative projects being created around OpenNebula.

Outreach

OpenNebula presented 20 keynotes, invited talks and tutorials in the main international events in cloud computing including CloudScape, FOSDEM, Open Source Datacenter, LinuxTag, NASA Ames, RootCamp Berlin, Matchmaking in the Cloud, CloudOpen, FrOSCon, Libre Software Meeting, BeLUG, GigaOM Structure:Europe, or LinuxCon Europe. C12G Labs started a series of Webinars focused on different aspects and possible deployments achieved by OpenNebula. Moreover, here’s been a lot of coverage in the media of OpenNebula during 2012. We created a page to keep track of the OpenNebula apparitions in the press.

* * *

If OpenNebula has become such a successful open source project is thanks to its awesome community of users and contributors. We would like to thank all the people and organizations who have contributed to OpenNebula by being active with the discussions, answering user questions, or providing patches for bugfixes, features and documentation. We appreciate your feedback and welcome your comments on all issues. The team will be monitoring this post for the next weeks or so and will try and answer all the questions we can.

Thanks for continuing to spread the word and stay tuned because we are announcing important changes in our release cycle and processes to make OpenNebula even more enterprise-ready and community-fiendly.

We’d also like to take this opportunity to wish you health, happiness and prosperity in 2013 to you and your loved ones!.

On behalf of the OpenNebula Project.

Neelie Kroes, European Commissioner for Digital Agenda, presented today at the Open Source Conference 2012 the three ways the European Union (EU) is supporting Open ICT systems, namely open-source, open-procurement, and open-data. Mrs. Kroes outlines the huge benefits of open-source and open-standards, the several hundred-million-euro benefits per year of Open ICT systems for the public sector alone, and how the EU is using open source solutions itself.

Mrs. Kroes made reference to OpenNebula as flagship of European open-source cloud innovation supported by EU investments that is laying the basis for interoperable data centers.

Since we started the OpenNebula project in 2005, we have helped many organizations develop value by building innovative cloud services and solutions to meet their user and customer needs in new ways or to meet new market needs. OpenNebula is playing an important role in driving and supporting the transition to cloud computing, and in accelerating the pace of innovation on the datacenter side.

Let make the most out of it!

“Federated Cloud Computing – The OpenNebula Experience” is the title of our keynote at the GARR 2012 Workshop on Distributed Computing and Storage. Given the scope of the workshop and the activity of GARR in the operation of the national high-speed telecommunication network for Research, the talk mostly focused on private cloud computing to support Science and High Performance Computing environments, the different architectures to federate cloud infrastructures, the existing challenges for cloud interoperability, and our vision for the future of existing Grid infrastructures.

We’ve had a lot to celebrate around here lately, including our fifth anniversary. Although OpenNebula started as a research project more than 7 years ago, it was in november 2007 when we created the OpenNebula open-source project. Since then, 12 stable versions have been released in a rapid release cycle to accelerate the transfer of innovation to the market, and OpenNebula has evolved into an active open-source project with a steadily growing community that, by many measures is more than doubling each year.

Some figures of the project:

• 500 validated users in our development infrastructure
• More than 100 active contributors
• More than 1,100 subscribed users in the mailing list
• More than 2,500 registered users in our demo cloud
• More than 5,000 downloads per month only from our repository
• More than 70,000 visits, 700,000 page views and 2,000,000 hits per month to our site
• Tens of thousands of deployments around the globe

What’s more interesting behind these figures is the quality of our community and their valuable contributions that include Industry and Research leaders building enterprise private clouds, cloud services, and clouds for HPC and Science. According to C12G’s latest Cloud Architecture Survey, the majority of OpenNebula deployments, 43 percent, are in business accounts compared to 17 percent in research, and less than 10 percent in academia.  It is encouraging to receive such a great feedback from you.

We are extremely happy with the organic growth of the project. It’s seven years old, it’s parked in some of the biggest organizations out there, and that all happened without any investment in marketing, just offering the most advanced and innovative solution for cloud management. An active and engaged community, along with our focus on solving real user needs in innovative ways and the involvement of the users in a fully vendor-agnostic project, constitute the OpenNebula’s recipe to success.

We’re now looking towards the next five years and continuing to focus on making sure OpenNebula continues to be the most solid, powerful and flexible open-source management platform to build and manage enterprise clouds. If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out all of the new features of OpenNebula 3.8. And, as always, feel free to contact us with any questions!