Rackspace has collaborated with Intel to open the first ever OpenStack Innovation Center at its headquarters in San Antonio, Texas.

The center will offer training and hardware resources to the OpenStack community. Its founders hope it will increase the number of developers working on the cloud platform, help invent new features and eliminate dangerous bugs.

“We are excited to collaborate with Intel and look forward to working with the OpenStack community to make the world’s leading open-source cloud operating system even stronger,” said Scott Crenshaw, senior vice president of product and strategy at Rackspace.

“We don’t create proprietary OpenStack distributions. Rackspace delivers its customers four-nines availability using entirely upstream trunk code. All of the Innovation Centre’s contributions will be made available freely, to everyone.”

Developers, developers, developers

OpenStack logo design
– Raul Chan

Rackspace was among the original founders of the OpenStack project and remains one of its largest contributors, although its influence has waned over the years.

Since it was established in 2010, OpenStack has become one of the fastest growing open source communities in the world, with more than 520 member companies and code from 27,000 individual developers. 451 Research estimates that the market for OpenStack products and services will grow to $1.26 billion in 2015 – an impressive figure for any open source project.

The new Innovation Center will house the world’s largest OpenStack development team to be assembled at the same location.

Besides code, this team will develop training materials, recruit new OpenStack engineers and maintain the world’s largest OpenStack developer cloud. It will consist of two 1,000 node clusters to support advanced, large-scale testing of new features - expected to become available for community use within the next six months.

“The depth of experience and community engagement that Rackspace and Intel offer makes this an exciting project, as the code contributions and large-scale testing will benefit everyone who uses OpenStack,” said Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation.

The OpenStack Innovation Center fits neatly into Intel’s recently announced ‘Cloud for All’ initiative, a series of investments and collaborations in the cloud software ecosystem designed to empower smaller cloud providers.