From the early days, Red Hat has supported the OpenStack project and we’ve built a platform of our own with Red Hat OpenStack Platform. This month, we look back at how far OpenStack has come in the last 10 years, how Red Hat has contributed and lastly, we celebrate the general availability of our next version with Red Hat OpenStack Platform 16.1, available later this month.

In the beginning

The year: 2010. The planet: Earth. The internet: booming. As humans advance technologically - our home shrinks and we become more connected to each other than ever before. At the heart of this beats the infrastructure - some public, some private. As the need for applications and services grew (and continues to grow), the requirements for the infrastructure that powers them grew alongside them.

While technology matures, customers now expect individualized, tailored experiences and these require applications running on infrastructure that is just as unique. This need brought the open source community together, not just to address these needs, but to also deliver an open cloud built from commodity parts, open standards and community blueprints. The community wanted to provide the tools for organizations to control their own destinies outside of large, proprietary cloud providers, and thus, in 2010, OpenStack was born.

Red Hat began working on the project in 2011, and by 2013 Red Hat OpenStack Platform was launched alongside the Grizzly (G) release.

Walk, run, cloud

By 2014, Red Hat was already a major contributor to the project. This not only brought enterprise support from a heavily-invested contributor, but also helped drive community input from customers who may not otherwise have participated. The increasing diversity and chorus of voices within the community helped bring forth new projects and features to solve problems. In addition, the introduction of Red Hat OpenStack Certification widened industry support, launching with more than 100 tech industry leaders as members.

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