[bebop]

It is not worse than AWS, but it is different. OpenStack is a collection of python programs that abstracts the physical hardware, such as cpu's, networking, storage and combines them to form a single interface over the top of the bare metal. Essentially you can turn many machines into an easy to use environment that looks like AWS.

In fact, all communication is done via web API's and there is even a compatibility API that speaks AWS. So if you have scripts that work with AWS, they will most likely work on OpenStack as well.

OpenStack is different in that not only can you choose an OpenStack provider, such as Rackspace, HP and others, but you can also run your own instance of OpenStack. All the software is released under the BSD 2 license. It can be a little tricky to get setup, but there are some projects out there to help get a working environment setup, DevStack in particular is very easy to use: http://devstack.org/