OpenStack began in 2010 as a joint project of RackSpace Hosting and NASA. More than 500 companies have joined the project since OpenStack is an open source software for building private and public clouds. This is a cloud operating system that controls a large pool of compute, storage and networking resources throughout a data center. OpenStack boosts business agility, availability and efficiency by providing a platform with on-demand, resource pooling, self-service, highly elastic, and measured services capabilities. OpenStack has certain capabilities, like Self service life cycle management, for example, the run, reboot suspend, resize and terminate instances. We don t need manual introduction to perform all these tasks. It will automatically do it using the different OpenStack services. Now, why would you want to do that? Can t you just subscribe with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, Salesforce, Google or some other cloud services provider? You certainly can. However, if you are not comfortable entrusting sensitive data to a third party and you have tons of it, then an on-premise or private cloud infrastructure would be the better choice. By building your own cloud in your own data center, you will have more control of your data. OpenStack enables you to do just that