I have to get one more post done tonight to note the news that Cloudscaling has secured an A round from Trinity Ventures.

Cloudscaling is known for building cloud infrastructures. The company is one of the few in the world that has actually built open cloud infrastructures from scratch. It is also one of the few that has actually deployed an OpenStack infrastructure.

The deal is noteworthy as it in many ways validates that an emerging ecosystem is developing around the open cloud and in particular, OpenStack.

Sources close to the deal tell us that Cloudscaling raised roughly $5 million. The company will use that funding to create what I am told is a “highly opinionated” product to build OpenStack infrastructures.

CTO and Co-Founder Randy Bias is one of the true leaders in the nascent open cloud space. His company built the KT (Korea Telecom) cloud storage infrastructure using OpenStack. Cloudstack from Cloud.com was used for the compute.

OpenStack has emerged as the leading open source cloud initiative.  Today it launched Diablo, its fourth release. Diablo is production ready but just barely.  As Bias said to me yesterday, it still takes a lot of expertise to build an OpenStack infrastructure.

Services Angle

It’s my expectation that OpenStack will add more automation to its releases in the next year. That will enter us into a new generation of innovation that will allow companies like Cloudscaling, Piston and Nebula to box their expertise into product offerings.

OpenStack is still nascent but it is getting more stable. The community is growing. And with it we see a growing number of startups focused on developing for the infrastructure. That is the key differentiator. With such an ecosystem, Cloudscaling and the other startups have far better odds for success.