New Guides Demystify the Open Cloud
If you're bewildered by the number of open cloud platforms and usage models for them that are available, there are some useful new guides you should know about. The Linux Foundation has announced the release of its 2015 report "Guide to the Open Cloud: Open Cloud Projects Profiled." To download the full report, you can visit The Linux Foundation's Publication's website at: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/publications/linux-foundation/guide-to-the-open-cloud
Meanwhile, The Open Data Center Alliance has issued a “usage model” that defines how computing, network and storage resources combine to form cloud infrastructure. It is available here.
The Linux Foundation's guide 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.
According to the Foundation's announcement:
"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 organization beginning a migration to the cloud or moving toward web-scale IT," said Amanda McPherson, chief marketing officer at The Linux Foundation, in a statement. "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 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.
You can find out more about the Open Datacenter Group's work on cloud usage models here. It is especially intended to “help guide enterprise IT consumers in their cloud service acquisition decisions."