Space agency NASA is withdrawing its participation with OpenStackSince launching two years ago, the OpenStack community of developers and cloud computing technologists have continued to improve on the open standard cloud computing software.
In more recent months, the open-source platform has seen a growing level of commercial adoption, drawing support from Dell, IBM, Cisco, HP, Yahoo!, and Red Hat.
In a presentation at Uptime Institute’s symposium on Tuesday, Karen Petraska, service executive for computing services at NASA’s CIO office, said the agency will scale back its development of the open-source platform now that it has started to see commercial adoption.
Petraska added that NASA is not interested in competing with commercial cloud companies, and would rather be a “smart consumer” of commercial cloud services.
In addition to reducing its work with OpenStack, NASA also said it will cease its developmental involvement with cloud infrastructure solution Nebula.
NASA’s move comes just a few weeks after its fellow OpenStack co-founder Rackspace revealed it will continue to build on its cloud investments like OpenStack to ramp up future revenues following a slightly disappointing first quarter.
Meanwhile, OpenStack continues to flourish in development, releasing its fifth version, Essex last month. The new platform is the culmination of contributions from 200 developers, and boasts 150 new features.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory website was breached last November, which resulted in hackers being able to install malware, delete or steal private information, and take control of user accounts to access privilege sections of the network
