OpenStack is fundamentally just software. There are many parts to the approximately 550,000 lines of code, most of which are written in Python. To manage the development of the various aspects of the project, OpenStack has been broken up into core projects, incubated projects, as well as supported and related projects. The most mature and important projects are core projects, and each one of those has its own committee and project technical lead. Newly-elected six-month memberships were recently given to project technical leads. These include, as of September 2012:
-Nova (Compute): Vish Ishaya, Rackspace
-Swift (Storage): John Dickinson, SwiftStack
-Glance (image service): Brian Waldon, Nebula
-Keystone (Identity, Token, Catalog and Policy services) PTL: Joe Heck, Nebula
-Horizon (user interface) PTL: Gabriel Hurley, Nebula
-Quantum (virtual networking, first time as a core project in Folsom release) PTL: Dan Wendlandt, Nicira
-Cinder (block storage, still in incubation) PTL: John Griffith, SolidFire
-Openstack-common (Python library for common utilities and components for all the OpenStack projects) PTL: Mark McLoughlin, OpenStack project lead at Red Hat
Network World staff writer Brandon Butler covers cloud computing and social collaboration. He can be reached at BButler@nww.com and found on Twitter at @BButlerNWW.
