The Linux Foundation has announced the release of its 2015 report “Guide to the Open Cloud: Open Cloud Projects Profiled.”
This is its second paper on the open cloud and adds many new projects and technology categories that have gained importance in the past year. The report covers well-known projects like Cloud Foundry, OpenStack, Docker and Xen Project, and up-and-comers such as Apache Mesos, CoreOS and Kubernetes.
The purpose of this guide is to serve as a starting point for users considering which projects to use in building and deploying their own open clouds. Taking a deeper look into cloud infrastructure, the paper includes storage, provisioning and platform projects. New categories outline emerging cloud operating systems, Software-defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) technologies.
“Our new ‘Guide To the Open Cloud’ is a helpful primer for any organisation beginning a migration to the cloud or moving toward web-scale IT,” said Amanda McPherson, chief marketing officer at The Linux Foundation. “Open source and collaboration are clearly advancing the cloud faster than ever before. Just consider the many OpenStack distributions and ecosystem emerging around Linux containers that didn’t even exist a year ago. Yet, as the open source cloud evolves so quickly, it can sometimes be difficult for enterprises to identify the technologies that best fit their needs.”
The Linux Foundation’s work with numerous cloud computing companies and projects and engagement at its CloudOpen, ApacheCon and MesosCon events helped shape the paper. For ease of reading, each category includes less than 10 projects, evaluated by maturity, number and diversity of contributions, number and frequency of commits, exposure, demonstrated enterprise use, and opinions from open source authorities.
