In July 2010, NASA and Rackspace, a publicly held, cloud-computing company, launched OpenStack — an open-source software project whose goal is to provide a free alternative to buying services from public cloud-computing providers or paying expensive license fees for commercial cloud software. OpenStack provides an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) capability by combining two technologies: compute, a NASA technology that provisions virtual machines at massive scale, and object storage, a Rackspace technology that reliably stores billions of objects distributed across standard hardware.