Trace OpenStack releases through the years

Born from compute projects at Rackspace and NASA, OpenStack has come a long way since its first release, Austin, in October 2010. Today, numerous companies and vendors, including Red Hat, Dell, HP and IBM, contribute to the open source platform, and there have been 13 OpenStack releases to date. Now, the technology is deployed in more than 180 countries and is supported by nearly 600 companies, according to the OpenStack website.

Nine critical components make up the OpenStack platform: Nova, Swift, Cinder, Neutron, Horizon, Keystone, Glance, Ceilometer and Heat. While OpenStack's modular design gives users the flexibility to piece together their own cloud environment, it also poses a number of challenges, and some organizations struggle to find the required skill sets and support.

But with each new release, OpenStack aims to solve those challenges, improving usability, scalability and efficiency. With a six-month release cycle, the most recent version of OpenStack, Mitaka, became available in April 2016.

Use the diagram below to track how OpenStack releases have evolved through the years.