OpenStack supporters downplay Citrix defection

03.04.2012

Another of Citrix's main reasons for giving CloudStack an Apache license was that officials said they wanted a product that would be go-to-market ready faster. OpenStack officials say they're happy with the progress of the movement.

McKenty says there's "no way OpenStack could be moving faster." He points to the development of a virtual networking project, code-named Quantum, in less than a year's time, as well as advancements in the Essex release.

There are other philosophical differences between the projects though, McKenty says. Citrix, he believes, may want to develop a community around its XenServer hypervisor system. OpenStack, McKenty says, will continue to support a variety of hypervisors. McKenty's not worried about losing support for the Xen hypervisor in OpenStack; Rackspace, he notes, uses Xen hypervisors, so their developers will continue to support the hypervisor within OpenStack. Losing support for a certain type of hypervisor could be a legitimate concern for some users, though. OpenStack's upcoming Essex release will no longer support the Hyper-V and hypervisor.

There is also a difference in the code that the software is written in. CloudStack is written in Java, while OpenStack is written in Python.

Overall, Bryce says Citrix's move will bring some competition between OpenStack and CloudStack because of overlaps in functionality and the fact that they are both open-source cloud platform projects. But, he's confident in OpenStack continuing to be a robust community development effort. "There are dozens and dozens of companies and people whose full-time jobs are to work on OpenStack," he says. "That's a pretty solid base of contributors."