By some measures, OpenStack is akin to the iPod: a technology that was once massively popular but whose heyday has seemed to pass. Unlike the iPod, however, OpenStack hasn't been discontinued. On the contrary, OpenStack remains alive and well as an open source project — and arguably, it has a particularly bright future at the moment, given trends in cloud computing that may encourage more organizations to consider building private clouds using OpenStack. OpenStack is an open source infrastructure platform designed to construct private clouds. OpenStack lets organizations combine physical servers into pools of virtual resources that they can then use to deploy virtual machines or containers. Released back in 2010, OpenStack was once among the latest, greatest trends in cloud computing. By the mid-2010s, however, the platform had begun to lag in popularity — or at least in public awareness — as more and more attention shifted to public cloud platforms, like AWS and Microsoft Azure.