Since joining Cisco several months ago, you may have heard me talk about the importance of architecture, APIs, and open source in Cloud Computing.  So today, I’m particularly proud to announce that Cisco has joined the OpenStack community.  The effort here is being led by the CTO organization but also draws on other engineers throughout Cisco’s product groups to help with the design, specification and development of this open source cloud stack.  And yes, that does mean code.

In our view, dynamic provisioning of the network and network-based services is an essential element of cloud computing.   In order for cloud computing to meet the challenges of tomorrow’s applications, we believe it is useful to view the network as an infrastructure service much like compute and storage is today. Imagine being able to create network abstractions that allow you to “isolate” a set of cloud resources, apply policies, and manage network services, whether in a single data center or distributed across the globe.
To achieve this, we believe that it is best to join with others from across the industry to work on open technologies and that open source is the ideal way to reach developers and learn from the community.

I am very excited about this announcement and look forward to working with other members of the OpenStack community at the upcoming design summits.

For more information on OpenStack, please go to:  www.openstack.org