Open Source Leads The Way Into The Cloud

Virtualization is now a well-established technology in enterprise computing. And in virtualization, VMware is the established leader. But virtualization has begat cloud computing and now the field of play in cloud computing is far more open thanks to open source technologies.

Looking around the cloud computing landscape, it is impossible to not find an explicit example of open source technology in use. In every layer of the cloud, there is open source to be found, from Linux at the operating system level to a panoply of open source cloud management tools that are very much the forward edge of the cloud ecosystem.

Looking at this level, we find technologies like CloudStack, Eucalyptus, and the hotter-than-the-sun OpenStack that are textbook examples of open source innovation in cloud computing; tools that enable sophisticated private and public cloud management for developers and system admins to have granular control over cloud-based apps and resources.