Community App Catalog is a Big Priority for the OpenStack Foundation

A foundation can do a lot to unite a community--just look at the example set by The Linux Foundation. This week, many leaders of the OpenStack Foundation gathered in Silicon Valley to talk about the future direction of the platform. EMC vice president of Technology Randy Bias, who is a director of the OpenStack Foundation, outlined essential steps needed to keep the platform healthy.

There was also talk surrounding container technology, and the recently created OpenStack Community App Catalog took center stage when the topic came up.

Back in May, the OpenStack Foundation rolled out a community application catalog built to facilitate collaboration and sharing on the OpenStack scene, where many IT administrators are wrestling with deploying the open cloud platform. The concept is to encourage administrators and others to leverage the work that has already been produced in OpenStack deployments.

"Visit the OpenStack Marketplace and select tools and methods for building your cloud," the foundation encourages. "Then come back to the OpenStack Application Catalog to make your cloud sing with applications."

“We’ve heard from many users and ecosystem companies that want a repository to publish and share things like Heat orchestration templates,” said Mark Collier, COO, OpenStack Foundation. “The new Community App Catalog takes us in that direction, and it gives our users a way to collaborate with each other and access new technologies in the OpenStack ecosystem."  

The Community App Catalog is a place where community members can share apps and tools in the form of Glance Images, Heat Templates and Murano Packages designed to integrate with OpenStack Clouds. Developers can experiment with emerging tools like Kubernetes and Docker by deploying packages that leverage the building blocks of OpenStack to handle authentication, networking, multi-tenant isolation and autoscaling of the underlying resources.  

This functionality--the ability to experiment with container technology--is being heavily emphasized as the Community App Catalog matures. You can visit http://apps.openstack.org and check it out.

Meanwhile, check out some of the reports coming out of this week's OpenStack gathering in Silicon Valley.