Changes

Kent Poots is a man of many talents. Kent is a software engineer and Seneca College teacher who has industry experience dealing with hardware/software interfacing among most software platforms (naming Linux as his specialty) and he is also a PhD student at York University. His genuine interest is in virtualization which is what led him to development with OpenStack. Cloud computing is gaining popularity and Kent realizes this. The “cloud” is everywhere and people are using it everyday when they google something, use an online storage provider or even stream media; and they may not even be realizing they are using the “cloud”. He explains that the popularity of the cloud’s use among users lies primarily in the SaaS( software as a service) tier of potential uses. While there is also PaaS (Platform as a Service) which could be the use of Google’s App Engine, He focuses on the lowest and most unused tier of the cloud capabilities which is IaaS (infrastructure as a service). The idea with OpenStack is to provide an operating system and full virtualization capabilities through the cloud; an open source Cloud Operating System. The big question that Kent wants to answer is how will the implementation scale from 10 instances to 1000?

== Cross Analysis: ==

Between both presentations it was clear to see that both projects have reached a successful point because of the open source community. When these projects reach the open source community, it gives the project a chance for users to see what is available to them and to align their needs to it. With Bitcoin, once Satoshi had completed his “Cathedral” bitcoin system, it was through the use of forums and the bitcoin mailing list that others started gaining interest in his new currency system. It was in December 2009 that his (or their..?) release 0.2 had been given to the hands of the open source community and development had begun to take off. For OpenStack, users and companies (such as Red Hat and Nasa) realized a need for enterprise level Virtualization to help manage tasks such as Remote Server communication, etc. Once companies and users could realize that they could grab the code for this purpose, they could then begin to tailor the available tools to meet their needs. It was this that led to the development of the many main components necessary to run OpenStack strongly and securely. Because OpenStack was open source software, components for storage, networking, identity management, and imaging were all allowed to come to fruition and help set OpenStack on it’s way to becoming a capable and robust solution for even Enterprise level development.