NASA & Rackspace’s OpenStack cloud platform is “battle-tested and ready to go”

OpenStack, the open source cloud platform backed by Rackspace and NASA, is “battle-tested and ready to go,” Lew Moorman, chief strategy officer and president of cloud for Rackspace, said today at the CloudBeat conference in Redwood Shores, Calif.

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(We’re live-streaming the CloudBeat conference, so you don’t have to miss a thing.)

140 companies have joined the project and are working to improve the OpenStack code base, Moorman said in a fireside chat with VentureBeat editor-in-chief Matt Marshall.

Moorman also disclosed that NASA and Latin America e-commerce giant MercadoLibra.com are just two of many large organizations already using the private beta OpenStack infrastructure. Sony and PayPal have committed to substantial deployments as well.

OpenStack, now 18 months-old, is available as open-source code and applications that are free to download from the OpenStack website. But until recently there were few applications available from commercial vendors that used the infrastructure.

“We made the decision to make this platform and help the world have a standard,” Moorman said. “We’re getting it ready to be the replacement of our compute fabric … we’re proud of the state that it’s in, but it still needs adjustments for scale.”

So we’ll have to settle for the generic “coming soon” answer for now, but Moorman did add that we should see an “amazing number” of OpenStack deployments in the next six months.

Correction: An earlier version of this story stated that OpenStack was not available to the public. We regret the error.