Common OpenSource Cloud OS

Introduction

Common OpenSource Cloud OS are viable alternatives to the expensive vendor-specific cloud OSs. Regardless of the two options, cloud Computing can be simply defined as a pool of centralized and shared computing resources delivered through the Internet. Furthermore, it provides economies of scale through aggregating computing resources and virtualization platforms.

Cloud Computing Overview

Cloud computing ensures a global reach of information and services using a computing environment which allows on-demand scalability. To get the above features, cloud computing can be accessible through private, public, hybrid and community deployment models. Further, services can be provisioned as IaaS, PaaS and SaaS service delivery models.

There are many commercial as well as open-source cloud computing providers that deliver the above deployment and service models depending on business requirements of customers. The most popular commercial cloud computing service providers include AWS, MS Azure, GCP and more. There are also formidable open-source cloud computing platforms that are freely available for customization and adoption.

The most popular open-source cloud platforms available for customization include the following:

OpenStack Cloud

OpenStack is the fastest growing free open-source cloud operating system as well as a collection of open-source software projects. Moreover, developers and cloud computing technologist can use it to setup as well as run their cloud compute and storage infrastructures.

A non-profit organization named as OpenStack Foundation, manages OpenStack. The foundation oversees both development and community building endeavors. OpenStack has one of the biggest communities and sponsorships.

The OpenStack project consists of three main components such as OpenStack Compute Infrastructure (Nova), OpenStack Object Store Infrastructure (Swift) and OpenStack Image Service Infrastructure (Glance). Furthermore, it is the Android of the cloud operating systems because of its openness, and comprehensive functionalities.

CloudStack

CloudStack is cloud computing software for creating, managing, and deploying public as well as private IaaS clouds. It uses several hypervisors such as KVM, vSphere, and XenServer/XCP for virtualization. It supports some key features such as hypervisor agnostic, snapshot management, usage metering, built-in HA for hosts and VMs.

Eucalyptus Cloud

Eucalyptus is free, open-source computer software for making AWS compatible private and hybrid cloud computing environments. Moreover, it enables pooling compute, storage, and network resources that can be dynamically scale up or down as application workloads change. It has six major components such as cloud controller (CLC), cluster controller (CC), storage controller (SC), VMware broker, and node controller (NC).

OpenNebula Cloud

OpenNebula is a cloud computing toolkit which is used to manage heterogeneous distributed datacenter infrastructures. And it controls a data center’s virtual infrastructure to build private, public as well as hybrid implementations of IaaS.

OpenNebula orchestrates storage, network, virtualization, monitoring, and security technologies to deploy multi-tier services such as compute clusters as VMs on distributed infrastructure. Additionally, it combines both data center as well as remote cloud resources.