The Linux Foundation Delivers 2015 Guide to the Open Cloud

The Linux Foundation has issued its second annual "Guide to the Open Cloud: Open Cloud Projects Profiled," which provides a comprehensive look at the state of open cloud computing. The foundation created the guide in response to investor calls it received where people were trying to understand which projects mattered.

This year's report adds many new projects and technology categories that have gained importance in the past year. It 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 the 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.

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

 You can also review the entire list in the online Open Cloud Directory on Linux.com at: http://www.linux.com/directory/open-cloud

“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. “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.”

There are several projects included in the guide that were hardly talked about in the last iteration, such as Docker.

You can use the guide to turn up lots of details on open cloud projects. For example, you can look up key contributors. In the case of OpenStack, the top contributors are listed as Cisco, HP, IBM, Mirantis, NEC, Rackspace, Red Hat and SUSE. There are many other in-depth statistics to take in.

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.