OpenStack

OpenStack is one of the most widely deployed cloud computing platforms in the world. It gives organizations full control over their infrastructure, running on-premises, in public cloud environments, or at the edge. Thousands of organizations run it in production, managing over 40 million cores globally across dozens of industries.

At its core, OpenStack pools compute, storage, and networking resources and exposes them through APIs or a web dashboard. You get standard infrastructure-as-a-service capabilities, plus additional components for orchestration, fault management, and service management to keep applications highly available.

What OpenStack supports:

• Virtual machines, bare metal, and containers - not locked into a single workload type
• Large-scale deployments - Walmart runs over 170,000 cores across 30+ regions on OpenStack
• Telecom-grade infrastructure - China Mobile built its NFV network on OpenStack with 50,000+ servers
• Autoscaling - Blizzard Entertainment uses it to handle variable load for live online games
• Apache 2.0 license - fully open source, no vendor lock-in

OpenStack is a genuine alternative to proprietary cloud platforms like Microsoft Azure when you need to own your infrastructure entirely. It's the right fit for enterprises, telecoms, and service providers that need scale, flexibility, and the ability to run everything on their own hardware.

Storage can be paired with Ceph for distributed block and object storage, and teams working with container-native workloads often combine OpenStack with Kubernetes for orchestration. For infrastructure-as-code workflows, tools like OpenTofu integrate naturally with OpenStack APIs.

The project is backed by the OpenInfra Foundation and has a large, active contributor community. There is a consistent release cadence that keeps the platform current.