AT&T has become the first US telecommunications company to join OpenStack, a community of companies and developers building an open-source platform for public and private clouds.
While it has participated in OpenStack for more than one year, AT&T first announced its participation publicly on Monday at its Developer Summit in Las Vegas. The company’s CTO John Donovan wrote in a blog post that AT&T’s OpenStack cloud was currently living on dedicated infrastructure at three of its US data centers: Dallas, San Diego and Secaucus, New Jersey.
“We plan to more than double the number of our centers with open-source capabilities in 2012,” he added.
Donovan revealed AT&T’s participation in OpenStack as he announced the company’s new “developer-centric” cloud AT&T Cloud Architect. The Architect provides computing and application development services to developers.
“While we deliver a differentiated cloud experience to a wide range of enterprise customers … we also understand that developers’ cloud needs differ significantly from those of enterprises,” Donovan wrote. In addition to the most users’ reliability and stability requirements, developers want their cloud solution to be flexible, affordable and have the ability to turn up new services quickly, he explained.
The OpenStack technology comprises of multiple projects, each delivering a component of the overall cloud infrastructure solution. More than 145 organizations are listed as participants, including Rackspace, Dell, Citrix, NTT, Internap and the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
Besides AT&T, users of OpenStack technology include Rackspace, NASA, DreamHost, MercadoLibre and Safew Labs among others.
Rackspace, the large US hosting and cloud-services company, has been one of the companies leading the charge on OpenStack.
In November, the company went beyond contributing to the project and using the technology in its own data centers. Rackspace started offering managed services and operational support for customers running OpenStack clouds in their facilities.