One of the great things about open source development is that as projects become more widely deployed, their evolutionary cycles shorten, as more engineers turn their talents toward adapting and advancing the technology. This process was on grand display last month when Comcast had the opportunity to host a mid-cycle meetup for the OpenStack development community.

Since 2012, when we first built our Comcast Cloud on OpenStack, we have been committed to advancing OpenStack development projects and evolving OpenStack to support the increasingly large and complex environments in which it is deployed.

Our Comcast Cloud Team has contributed more than 36000 lines of code to past and present OpenStack releases. And having followed the OpenStack community around the world to various summits and meetups, the obvious next step for us was to host when the mid-cycle finally came to Philadelphia.

Tracking with the continued growth of the community, the mid-cycle (which typically draws only a fraction of the participation we see at the twice-yearly OpenStack summits) featured a capacity crowd of more than 150 developers and operators.

The robustness of that development community – illustrated well by my colleague Shilla Saebi in OpenStack Superuser – fuels our optimism about the future of OpenStack.

While some have raised concerns about its scalability, our experience suggests that OpenStack is highly scalable, so long as you have OpenStack operators – like Comcast – who are committed to running OpenStack at scale and creating solutions to support larger–scale deployments.

We’re proud of the work we’ve done to propel OpenStack’s continually accelerating development, and honored to be an active participant in the global community that makes the technology so powerful.

We’re already working on taking what we learned in March and contributing toward the next OpenStack release. We will have a lot more to share next month, when we will speak on three panels (and participate in many more) at the OpenStack Spring Summit in Vancouver.