A New Chapter, Nimbula Joins OpenStack

At Nimbula, we’ve been focused on bringing our customers the best possible cloud infrastructure. Nimbula Director delivers all the elasticity and self-service of modern cloud but with all the security, and operational readiness expected of enterprise software. In the last year and a half, we’ve released Nimbula Director 1.0, 1.5, and 2.0. We’ve been deployed all over the world to help with development and test, SaaS hosting, and batch processing. Our customers are in enterprise, internet, and government. Now, we are proud to announce the next step in our journey. As of today, Nimbula joins the OpenStack Foundation and the Openstack development community.

Why is Nimbula making this move?
Over the last year, a number of our customers and prospects have been asking us if we can provide them our enterprise ready cloud platform on top of an open core model and we are responding to that demand. The requirement for an open core model comes down to the following four value propositions.

• Open source: An open source base guarantees no vendor with a great idea is prevented from quickly getting started and competing on level footing.
• Community: The community model and massive vendor and developer participation guarantee fast introduction of new functionality.
• Extensibility: API-driven extensibility guarantees that the cloud can be extended to any network or storage system and can be well managed by any external software. A customer’s cloud will not stall waiting on one vendor to release a particular feature or integration.
• Choice: Most importantly, the proliferation of compliant distributions gives the customers what they most need, choice of the right provider with the future ability to replace that provider at any time – delivering them the right infrastructure at the right price over the long term.

With multiple open source cloud offerings, we chose OpenStack because we have been very impressed with the continued rate of growth of the project and community. The developer base, vendor commitment, product features, and most importantly customer traction have grown remarkably well in only a short time. Furthermore, as we have spoken with key OpenStack participants in the last few months, we have found significant mutual interest. While we are looking to meet the open core demand, many in the OpenStack community has shown interest in our capabilities and differentiators and have wanted to see that technology work to advance OpenStack.

Product Strategy
Nimbula’s product strategy is four-fold

• Nimbula Director becomes an OpenStack cloud: Nimbula will continue to build, deliver, and support Nimbula Director as a complete packaged cloud platform solution. In the short term, we will be adding OpenStack APIs over Nimbula Director so that we meet the customer demand of OpenStack compatibility and so that our customers can leverage the OpenStack solutions ecosystem. While there are a growing number of OpenStack distributions, Nimbula Director will continue to distinguish itself in scale, reliability, operational excellence, a modern cloud networking model, and an authorization system that models real business practices.
• Contribute: Nimbula has strong IP developed over the past few years that can be of use by the OpenStack project. We will start working right away with the OpenStack development community to identify and contribute code to improve OpenStack’s scalability, reliability, and security.
• Merge: Over time, Nimbula Director will move from just having OpenStack APIs to ultimately sharing much of the core code. This will prevent duplication of efforts and will ensure quicker pickup of new OpenStack functionality into Nimbula Director as it releases.
• Componentize: To the extent that Nimbula has functionality that we and the community decide is not part of the core of the cloud, Nimbula will separate out that functionality into modules for delivery both as part of Nimbula Director, but also as stand alone software that can work with other OpenStack distributions.

Customer Impact
While Nimbula will work as aggressively as possible to be a part of  OpenStack, our strongest commitment is to our existing customers. There will at no point be a regression in functionality or a let down on producing an enterprise ready cloud product. Nimbula Director continues to be Nimbula’s only product and we will make sure that the introduction of OpenStack APIs, functionality, and eventually code is non-disruptive and dealt with as just a part of the product upgrade process.

Closing
In closing, we at Nimbula would like to thank our customers for getting us where we are today and the OpenStack community for their warm and gracious welcome. We are proud to have had the support we’ve had from individuals, vendors, and the OpenStack Foundation itself. We are extremely excited about this new chapter and look forward to being a major contributor to OpenStack and its continued technology growth and market success.