Open-source cloud solutions continue to grow in popularity due to their many benefits such as cost-effectiveness, flexibility, customization, scalability, and interoperability. These platforms enable enterprise and service providers to build and implement their own clouds with the options of integrating with vendor products or avoiding vendor dependency. By leveraging various open-source platforms, organizations can use private, public, and hybrid clouds to build and manage their unique infrastructures.

What is Open-Source Cloud Computing?

Open-source cloud platforms are any software’s source code that is readily available to the public without cost. Developers and end-users can employ open-source tools for any purpose. The tools are free to use, study, modify, integrate, and redistribute at no charge. Open-source tools include operating systems, firmware, software frameworks, business applications, workflows, and virtualization stacks.

A cloud service can be built using any open-source tools or technologies. These cloud services include public, private, hybrid, and multi-clouds. The open-source tools can create solutions such as service-as-a-service (SaaS), infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-serve (PaaS), and other service solutions.

Top Four Open-Source Cloud Platforms

CloudStack is an open-source infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud computing platform. It is designed for both private and public clouds. It is a massively scalable infrastructure with faster deployment that allows enterprises and service providers to build and manage large networks of virtual machines. As a cloud management platform, CloudStack offers a wide range of services and resources including multi-tenant security, different types of storage options, compute orchestration, and on-premises private clouds.

Another versatile open-source platform is Eucalyptus. The name is an acronym for Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems. With this software, service providers can build scalable Amazon Web Services (AWS)-compatible private and hybrid clouds while also deploying multiple applications in the cloud. It is an on-premises IaaS solution that combines virtualized infrastructures to build cloud resources. Eucalyptus provides cloud software that allows end-users to provision compute and storage services on demand.

OpenNebula is an open-source IaaS solution for enterprise private, hybrid, and edge cloud infrastructure. It provides the best features of both private cloud and public cloud while supporting the evolving needs of your organization. OpenNebula builds private clouds while also regulating data center virtualization. The software combines many technologies – monitoring, storage, networks, and security - for the deployment of multiple services as virtual machines, and providing remote cloud and data center resources.

One of the most-used open-source solutions is OpenStack, a cloud computing platform form that develops, deploys, and manages private and public clouds. As an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) technology, OpenStack can control virtual servers and a large group of storage, compute, and network resources that end-users can access. The software has a set of components and tools that work together to create heterogeneous infrastructures that are either within a private cloud or outside a public cloud.

Open-source cloud platforms enable enterprise and service providers to leverage the multi-faceted resources of both open-source and closed-source technologies to create a seamless integration of various products from different vendors. For help in using the best open-source platform currently available, contact RingStor. As a data management company, we are here to assist your organization. Contact us today by email or call (609) 955-3422.