Public hosting

As we mentioned before, OpenStack was originally created with code contributions from NASA and Rackspace. NASA's interest in OpenStack sprang from their desire to create a private elastic compute cloud, whereas the primary goal for Rackspace was to create an open source platform that could replace their public shared hosting infrastructure. As of April 2015, the Rackspace Public Cloud offering had been ported to OpenStack and had passed the OpenStack Powered Platform certification.

The Rackspace implementation offers both Compute and Object Storage services, but some implementations may choose to offer only Compute or Object Storage and receive certifications for those services. DreamHost, another public OpenStack-based cloud provider, for example, has chosen to break their managed services down into DreamCompute and DreamObjects, which implement the services separately. The DreamObjects service was implemented and offered first as a compliment to DreamHost's existing shared web hosting, and the DreamCompute service was introduced later.

Most public hosting providers focus primarily on the Compute service, and many do not yet offer software-defined networking through the Neutron network service (DreamCompute being a notable exception). Architects of hosting platforms will focus first on tenancy issues, second on chargeback issues, and finally on scale.