Think Rackspace, NASA, Dell, Red Hat, IBM, Yahoo!, Cisco, and more. It's comprised of thought leaders, developers, users, and more all coming together in the name of cloud computing. Identity Crisis 3: Maturity The reality is the OpenStack project was launched in 2010 and the OpenStack Foundation is brand new in 2012. As a young project, OpenStack needs time to sort out its governance, development projects, and marketplace. While the software projects are amazing and innovative, the complexity and skill-sets required to deploy and operate OpenStack are not to be underestimated. Furthermore, OpenStack is NOT Linux and does not yet have mature distributions with the certification of leading software application vendors. How fast will OpenStack mature in the face of competitive pressures of the companies providing development, deployment, support, and more? One final thought, while OpenStack is garnering all the attention and media hype, there are alternatives in the market.