This week, the OpenStack Foundation launched the OpenStack Marketplace to provide interested parties with a centralized resource for vetted OpenStack products and services. The marketplace is organized into the five categories of Training, Distros (distributions) and Appliances, Public Clouds, Consulting & Integrators and Drivers. Public clouds listed in the OpenStack marketplace have to run a recent version of OpenStack and reveal their OpenStack APIs. Public cloud vendors included in the initial version of the marketplace include Cloudwatt, HP, IO, Internap, Kio Networks, Rackspace, UnitedStack and Vexxhost. OpenStack distributions and appliances that cater to private clouds similarly must pass the constraint of running a recent OpenStack version and exposed OpenStack APIs. Distros and appliances in the marketplace include Canonical, Cloudscaling, EMC, HP, IBM, MetaCloud, Mirantis, Nebula, Oracle, Piston, Rackspace, Red Hat, SUSE and SwiftStack. Importantly, the marketplace also contains a list of drivers that ensure the compatibility of OpenStack technology with hardware and software that leverages data from the Driverlog project maintained by the OpenStack community. Because all products within the marketplace must be screened by the OpenStack Foundation prior to inclusion, the marketplace allows consumers to make choices knowing that products in its purview have been reviewed carefully by the OpenStack Foundation and community. Designed to accelerate OpenStack adoption by simplifying the process of the selection of vendors and technologies, the launch of the marketplace represents a significant milestone for the OpenStack community insofar as it vaults OpenStack into the company of enterprise software communities such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Oracle and IBM that similarly boast online marketplaces. IBM, for example, today announced the availability of its IBM Cloud Manager with OpenStack product on its recently launched IBM Cloud Marketplace.
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