The OpenStack open source cloud project completed its first public Design Summit last week, which attracted more than 250 people from 90 companies and 14 countries. Development teams met to plan the next two releases, which are currently code-named "Bexar" and "Cactus."

This first public meeting was held as a four-day event in San Antonio, Texas, and was hosted by Rackspace Hosting, a founding member of the open source project. The summit featured two separate tracks, one consisting of developer-led sessions to plan the next two code releases and one for interested users and the partner ecosystem to discuss deployment and commercial opportunities.

The Summit also featured what was labeled as an "InstallFest" where attendees were able to test and document the installation process on a live, on-site environment provided by Dell and powered by the company's PowerEdge C server line.

"From development, to documentation and deployment, the OpenStack Design Summit has enabled the OpenStack community to come together to learn and make the key decisions for the next two code releases," said Jim Curry, general manager of OpenStack.

"The themes for the week focused on how to execute on enterprise and service provider deployments and the immense opportunity that exists for the commercial ecosystem," he added.

Dozens of developers are reported to have contributed to the first "Austin" code release in October this year — and a similar number engaged in proposing new features for the next "Bexar" release scheduled for early 2011.