The creator of the Piston Enterprise Operating System, or PentOS, was lauded for his contributions in helping to create cloud computing itself, through the pioneering NASA Nebula project. There, NASA first demonstrated how to fit a data center cluster in an ordinary shipping container, proving the space program can still produce benefits today.
But last year, Joshua McKenty one-upped himself. He fit an almost entirely self-provisioning cloud operating system for a common rack of servers, onto a USB thumb drive. You plug the thumb device into a PC, edit maybe three lines of a text configuration file, save it, unplug it, plug it into the main server in the rack, and turn it on.
In a very clever demonstration video (above), McKenty demonstrates what I call the “Just Add Water” nature of the configuration process. On Wednesday, Piston Cloud’s PentOS – the first commercial implementation of OpenStack, born from NASA Nebula – emerged from public beta into general availability. In addition came news that Dell has signed on as a provider of Piston Cloud-certified hardware. (I remember the hoops Dell’s predecessor, PCs Limited, had to jump through to become DOS-certified.)
On the first birthday of Piston Cloud’s existence, in an effort to share news as to the progress of its efforts toward the goal of world domination, company officials have provided via Twitter this detailed glimpse of its own progress chart, shown here as originally depicted through the medium of frosting.
