The Linux Foundation Launches its 2016 Guide to the Open Cloud

The Linux Foundation has announced the release of its 2016 report "Guide to the Open Cloud: Current Trends and Open Source Projects." This third annual report provides a comprehensive look at the state of open cloud computing. The foundation originally created the guide in response to market and industry confusion about which projects really stand out.

According to Libby Clark, writing on Linux.com:  "The report aggregates and analyzes industry research to provide insights on how trends in containers, microservices, and more shape cloud computing today. It also defines the open source cloud and cloud native computing and discusses why the open cloud is important to just about every industry."

This year's report covers well-known projects like Cloud Foundry, CloudStack, Docker, KVM and OpenStack, and up-and-comers such as Ansible, Hygieia, Prometheus and Rancher. You can learn more about everything from microservices to containers with this guide. Taking a deeper look into cloud infrastructure, the paper includes information on storage, provisioning and platform projects. There is discussion of cloud operating systems, Software-defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) technologies.

At The Linux Foundation’s Publication’s website, you can download the report now.

"Open source is software is prevalent in the cloud and is often the preferred choice for new infrastructure technology deployments," said Mark Hinkle, VP of marketing at The Linux Foundation. "The Guide to the Open Cloud was created to provide an overview of the latest open source software used to deploy and manage cloud deployments as well as illustrate emerging design patterns including those utilizing containers, cloud-native applications and microservices."

There are several projects included in the guide that were hardly talked about in the last iteration. As the announcement of the guide notes:

"The Linux Foundation's work with numerous cloud computing companies and projects (Cloud Foundry, Cloud Native Computing Foundation's Kubernetes) and engagement at its ContainerCon, ApacheCon and MesosCon events helped shape the paper. For ease of reading, each category includes 15 or fewer projects, evaluated by the project's origins, age of the project, number of contributors, number and frequency of commits, diversity of contributions, exposure, demonstrated enterprise use, and expert opinions from IT practitioners. All profile data were collected from public sources, including project websites and source code repositories."