DreamHost OpenStack IaaS Offering Exits Private Beta

Written by Chris Talbot 1
October 30, 2014

DreamHost's DreamCompute infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering has exited private beta, and now the company is aiming to attract customers with its Amazon EC2 competitor.

DreamHost‘s DreamCompute infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering has exited private beta, and now the company is aiming to attract customers with its Amazon EC2 (AMZN) competitor.

DreamCompute first surfaced a couple of years ago at OpenStack Summit. Back then, DreamHost executives talked it up as a highly-scalable, cost-effective IaaS offering built on OpenStack open source cloud software. The company had big plans to take on EC2. Now, more than two years later, DreamHost is apparently satisfied with its beta testing.

Since then, we’ve seen a handful of OpenStack versions arrive, and most of OpenStack’s success has proven to be in the private cloud arena. A public cloud offering based on OpenStack that will compete with EC2, Rackspace‘s (RAX) public cloud IaaS and others in the growing market could be interesting.

“We believe your cloud infrastructure shouldn’t exist in a ‘black box,’ particularly in the world of open source,” said Justin Lund, DreamCompute project lead, in a prepared statement. “We made a conscious decision to provide users access to the OpenStack Compute, Networking, Image Service, Identity and Block Storage APIs so that developers can use existing deployment tools to get their apps out there. We’ve gone to great lengths to document the very architecture of DreamCompute to be as transparent as possible with our users. We believe that when the cloud is open, everybody wins.”

DreamHost is targeting DreamCompute at software developers to provide the infrastructure they need for development and test environments, as well as full production deployments.

With DreamCompute, users can create unmanaged virtual servers on demand. According to DreamHost, all virtual servers gain the benefits of full tenant isolation, support for IPv4 and IPv6, as well as access to full administrator privileges.

After more than two years of talk and testing, DreamHost is launching DreamCompute into a very different market—one that is increasingly more competitive. Whether it can stand up to the various IaaS providers already dominating the space is a good question.