Yes, time flies, and it is now time to celebrate the 7th anniversary of OpenNebula.org. In the post we wrote last year to celebrate our sixth anniversary we described the progress of the project in terms of its community, adoption and innovation. We are really proud to confirm that those figures are growing at the same rate.

This year we would like to focus on our commitment to the open cloud. We think it is important to clearly state what “open”, “simple”, “scalable”, and “flexible” mean for us. Mostly because, as you well know, terms like “open-” and “open-source” are used by many vendors as a marketing tool to lock you into their own version or distribution of a hyped open-source software. Well, I think you know what we mean.

• Openness means you can run production-ready software that is fully open-source without proprietary extensions that lock you in. Yes, this means that OpenNebula does not need enterprise extensions. Yes, OpenNebula is not a limited version of an enterprise software… There is one and only one OpenNebula distribution, and it is truly open-source, Apache licensed, and enterprise-ready. There is no fragmentation.  As recently stated by one of our users:

“Other open-source cloud management platforms do not work out of the box, you need to go through a vendor – they are open source but vendor-based and brings proprietary components”

• Simplicity means that you do not need an army of administrators to build and maintain your cloud. OpenNebula is a product and not a toolkit of components that you have to integrate to build something functional. Moreover your cloud will run for years with little maintain. As recently stated by one of our users:

“It is easy to bring existing sysadmins to handle OpenNebula since it is just standard components that is used”

• Flexibility means that you can easily build a cloud to fit into your data center and policies. Because no two data centers are the same, we do not think there’s a one-size-fits-all in the cloud, and we do not try to impose requirements on data center infrastructure. We try to make cloud an evolution by leveraging existing IT infrastructure, protecting your investments, and avoiding vendor lock-in. As recently stated by one of our users:

“OpenNebula captured my interest for several technical reasons besides the fact that it is truly open. It’s architecture is very elegant; it has C++ bones, ruby muscles and bash tendons. It’s extensible and understandable”

• Scalability means that you can easily grow the size of each zone and the number of zones. Some of our main users have reported infrastructures with tens of zones distributed worldwide that have executed several hundreds of thousands of virtual machines. As recently stated by one of our users:

“Very simple to use, implement and deploy, but yet, you guys make it very scalable and reliable”

Fully embedded in our commitment to the open-source world, we are immersed in a disruptive move, building a bridge between the proprietary virtualization field dominated by VMware and the open source cloud arena. We are doing so with an integration between OpenNebula and vCenter, easy to use and to deploy, bringing cloud features on top of production virtualized infrastructures. VMware users can take a step toward liberating their stack from vendor lock-in. Being OpenNebula a platform independent software, they can gradually migrate to open virtualization platforms.

Looking back, it is inspiring the distance that we have come together. And that is nothing compared to what is planned for the future. We look forward to meeting you in a few days in Berlin in our second OpenNebula Conference, we have a lot to celebrate.

Thanks to all of you and happy anniversary!

On behalf of the OpenNebula Project