The open source OpenStack cloud computing platform has grown significantly since it was first introduced in July 2010. The effort was originally started by NASA and Rackspace and has since grown to include more than 100 vendors including HP, Dell and Cisco.

Now OpenStack developers are aiming to help make it easier than ever for enterprises and developers to get familiar with OpenStack. A new effort called TryStack debuted last week, providing developers and users the opportunity to try OpenStack on a hosted infrastructure.

"This environment is really meant to lower the barrier to getting that first glimpse of an OpenStack cloud," Mark Collier, Rackspace vice president of business & corporate development, told InternetNews.com . "That might be a user that just wants to try the Dashboard to launch a virtual machine or two, or a developer that wants to test their application using the OpenStack APIs to ensure compatibility."

With TryStack users, get their own OpenStack compute instance that lasts for up to 24 hours. The first TryStack deployment zone is hosted on infrastructure that has 156 cores, 1040GB memory and 59.1 TB of disk storage. While Rackspace is one of the leaders of the OpenStack effort, they aren't actually hosting the TryStack initiative.