Big part of the cloud announcements Oracle made at this week’s OpenWorld conference in San Francisco was OpenStack, the open-source cloud architecture and operating system conceived, to a great extent, by NASA and RackSpace.

The company’s public and private cloud plays now have an OpenStack angle. Its private cloud infrastructure solution, Exalogic Elastic Cloud, will eventually use OpenStack-based cloud management software by recently acquired Nimbula, and users of virtual compute and storage services the company plans to add to its public-cloud portfolio next year will be able to provision those resources through OpenStack.

Mark Collier, COO of the OpenStack Foundation, the non-profit that oversees the open-source development community, saw the announcement as yet another endorsement of the technology. “Oracle’s announcement is another proof point the industry is embracing OpenStack APIs,” he said in an emailed statement.

Big IT vendors that support OpenStack and have been developing products and services around it include Dell, HP, IBM, NetApp, Cisco and EMC, among others. Major service providers that have built cloud offerings using the architecture include Rackspace and AT&T.

For Oracle, this week’s announcements are only initial steps in the process of integrating OpenStack into its offerings.

The company expects to launch its public cloud infrastructure services (bare virtual compute and resources provisioned over the Internet and used on a pay-as-you basis) some time in the first half of 2014. Thomas Kurian, executive VP of software development at Oralce, said users will be able to provision cloud VMs or storage volumes in the Oracle infrastructure cloud using the OpenStack Swift API (application programming interface).

“We’re not requiring you to use a proprietary interface to deploy and access these environments,” he said during a press conference at OpenWorld.

Oracle bought Nimbula, its OpenStack play on the private cloud side, in March. This week, it announced a “roadmap” for integrating Nimbula Director (the company’s cloud management software) with Exalogic.

The integrated solution will include features like native Exalogic Infiniband integration and Oracle VM virtualization, scalable to thousands of VMs. The company is also planning to include deployment blueprints for automatic provisioning of Oracle applications, its Fusion middleware and other vendors’ software on the private cloud infrastructure.

Oracle said it was also planning to integrate Nimbula with its Enterprise Manager 12c software.

OpenStack-compatible APIs will enable users to easily move workloads between on-premise environments and Oracle’s public cloud, the company said.