Open Source Cloud Platform: The wrestling between Ming and the dark

The rise of the OpenStack, blew the cloud platform market open Source Camp Challenge commercial power horn. The noise of global heat, cloudstack, Eucalyptus, Opennebula followed, four open source cloud platform around the "open cloud" launched a new round of checks and balances and games.

In the past September, the open source community has ushered in two big things. September 8, after the OpenStack Foundation Board supplementary meeting discussion and vote, "also Friends of the enemy" VMware and Intel, NEC together, officially won the OpenStack Foundation Gold membership. The following September 19, the OpenStack Foundation was formally established, and one of the sponsors of the project, Rackspace, formally handed over community management activities and OpenStack trademarks to the Foundation. Prior to that, another OpenStack partner, NASA, also faded out of the OpenStack organization, transforming itself from a developer into a technology user. Thus, OpenStack's mission as an independent non-profit organization has been announced.

OpenStack has recently brought another jolt to the open source community and the entire IT community. In fact, from 2011 onwards, the new generation of open source projects have gained a continuing high level of concern. In the quiet open source world, the obsession with a technology seems to go back to the Linux era. But such a hot scene is also reasonable, the most important reason is that the rise of OpenStack and swept the world's cloud computing wave. As an Open-source cloud Platform project, the IaaS (Infrastructure-Service) framework provided by OpenStack allows anyone to build and deliver cloud computing services. It can also be used to build private clouds that provide shared services within the enterprise. In short, it can help service providers and businesses build an IaaS platform similar to Amazon EC2 and S3.

The application scenarios that OpenStack can deliver are attractive to both businesses and developers. At the same time, with the Apache 2.0 licensing protocol being created from the project, the open source IaaS framework provided by OpenStack is naturally open. This openness triggers the enthusiasm of all types of businesses and community developers. Since the launch of the project, the OpenStack code base has more than 550,000 lines of code, and more than 573 developers have contributed their own code. The OpenStack Foundation has raised 10 million of billions of dollars, and the number of companies joining the OpenStack ecosystem has reached an astonishing 192.

In the open source world, however, OpenStack is not the only provider of IaaS technology frameworks, including Cloudstack, Eucalyptus (Chinese to Eucalyptus), Open source projects, such as Opennebula and Ovirt, can also help companies build services that resemble the Amazon public cloud, either internally or externally. Long-term observers in cloud computing, Sina Micro-Bob Master @forestzrd, described OpenStack as "a pioneer in the world" and "the person who really stirred the pool" in the open source cloud platform. In fact, prior to the creation of the OpenStack project, these open source projects from the United States and Europe have already established a certain influence in the developer and enterprise user groups, and are steadily developing their own partner systems.

Perhaps OpenStack's embrace of the gesture (from the project to take the Apache Licensing protocol way) moved the vast number of developers, or openstack nature of the "radical factor" to be released, OpenStack brought a true technical movement. However, in this campaign on open source and cloud, OpenStack is destined not to walk alone, and the open source cloud Platform project, including Cloudstack, Eucalyptus and Opennebula, has also locked the goal of victory, and the clear and dark wrestling between technology and business models is underway. One of the early major contributors to the OpenStack project, Jie (Citrix), turned to support similar open-source projects Cloudstack, which launched a grand and suspenseful opening for this wonderful campaign.

(Responsible editor: Lu Guang)