After Openstack was launched
with much fanfare during OSCON, there has been a flurry of activity on the development community with thousands of contribution from hundreds of developers. Even though the main contribution is towards compute and storage, there are many smaller projects underway in the Openstack ecosystem. One such project is the iPad app for Openstack
.
What is it?
The Openstack iPad app is based on Rackspace’s iPad app but it has few other features not present in Rackspace app at present. Some of the features in Openstack iPad app are
- Uses Openstack Compute and Storage APIs to manage compute and storage resources
- Viewing RSS system status feeds
- Ability to ping the nodes from different parts of the world
- Emailing files from Openstack object storage
- Integration with chef platform
Why is it exciting?
Being an unabashed advocate of open source and someone who got excited about Openstack from the beginning, I find this exciting for many reasons
- Users will be able to access any provider who uses Openstack platform using this app. If my dream of an open federated cloud ecosystem happens, this will be the one stop app for many cloud providers
- This app is released under an open source license (Apache license) and anyone can add value on top of this app and customize it for their needs. If enterprises start embracing Openstack, this will give them an opportunity to customize the app to meet their needs based on their policies
- This app is integrated into the Chef platform. This means that I can take any recipe and run it to configure my infrastructure while I am waiting in the line to pick up my coffee in Starbucks
Bottomline
The fate of this app is linked to the fate of Openstack. If Openstack gains traction like many of us expect, this app will be one of the widely used/forked app by the IT folks. Even otherwise, it is an interesting experiment to study how an open source app evolves in a proprietary ecosystem like iPhone.
Please see the following video for a demo of what you can do with this app. If you want more information, check out this post by Mike Mayo.
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