In February 2010 , Microsoft released Azure , which was announced in October 2004. In July 2010 , Rack Space Hosting and NASA jointly launched an open source cloud-software venture known as OpenStack. The Open Stack project aims to support cloud-computing service providers running on standard hardware. The initial code came from NASA 's Nebula platform as well as the Cloud Files platform in RackSpace. As with other open source solutions like Cloud Stack , Mathematics and Open Nebula , it has attracted attention from a number of core communities. Most research aims to compare these open source sources based on a set of criteria.