The origins of OpenStack lie in Rackspace, a cloud company. Some years ago, Rackspace was using its own infrastructure code to manage its hosting infrastructure. In 2010, Rackspace wanted to rewrite the infrastructure code. At this point in time, Rackspace considered making the code widely available by open sourcing it. Anso Labs, which was contracting for NASA, had released the beta version of its product, Nova. Nova was a cloud computing fabric controller and was written in Python. The resources of both these companies merged, and thus OpenStack was formed. The early code was a combination of Rackspace's cloud file platform and NASA's Nebula platform. NASA made Nebula open source, and Rackspace did the same with its cloud software. 

On July 13 and 14, 2010, the first OpenStack Design Summit was held in Austin, Texas. On July 21 of the same year, the project was officially announced at Portland, Oregon, at OSCON.

At the OpenStack conference in 2011, which was held in Boston, Rackspace declared that there would be an OpenStack Foundation, which would be in charge of project governance and would be responsible for the ownership of the OpenStack trademark. The OpenStack Foundation was jointly created by 27 companies. The formation of the OpenStack Foundation was formally announced on April 12, 2012.

OpenStack was initially started with two projects: Nova, from NASA, and Cloud File, from Rackspace. The community started growing, and new projects were added to OpenStack. Around the end of 2012, the concept of incubation was introduced. The idea was to grow projects, for inclusion in OpenStack.