OpenStack Innovation Center

The OpenStack Innovation Center is a research and development facility dedicated to the open source cloud platform OpenStack. The center was a joint venture between technology vendors Rackspace and Intel.

The aim of the OpenStack Innovation Center is to recruit and train open source developers to advance the OpenStack platform. The center strives to improve OpenStack reliability, manageability and scale, according to Intel and Rackspace. Additionally, the facility serves as a center of excellence for Intel and Rackspace engineers focused on OpenStack.

Rackspace created OpenStack in 2010 alongside NASA. The technology is a popular open source alternative to public cloud infrastructure as a service platforms like Amazon Web Service (AWS), Google Compute Engine and Microsoft Azure. OpenStack is freely available under the Apache 2.0 license and is often compared to Eucalyptus and the Apache CloudStack project, two other open source cloud initiatives. Companies that use OpenStack include eBay, PayPal, Comcast and Time Warner Cable.

With the OpenStack Innovation Center, Rackspace and Intel aim to develop new OpenStack features, improve performance and remove bugs through upstream code contributions. The project will deliver all contributions to the OpenStack community for review. The facility offers two 1,000-node OpenStack cloud clusters to support large-scale OpenStack testing. According to Intel and Rackspace, the center creates the world's largest OpenStack development team.

Intel and Rackspace first announced plans for the OpenStack Innovation Center on July 23, 2015. The facility opened in September 2015 and is located at Rackspace's San Antonio, Texas headquarters.