OpenStack emerged in 2010 from collaboration between Rackspace and NASA as a fully open-source cloud platform. It grew rapidly by organizing cloud functionality into modular services for compute, storage, networking, identity, and orchestration.
Its open governance model and broad vendor ecosystem helped OpenStack become a primary private-cloud foundation for many enterprises, service providers, and research institutions.
Over time, OpenStack adopted more operational tooling for upgrades, lifecycle management, and containerized control planes, while continuing regular coordinated release cycles.