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Open source cloud technologies at a glance

Cloud Quartet

Until recently, the open source cloud platform race was easy to keep track of: In 2008, it was a one-horse race with OpenNebula available under the Apache License; a year later, the GPLv3-licensed Eucalyptus joined in. Again, a year later, the OpenStack project was initiated by Rackspace, which has been the subject of increased media attention recently. In summer 2011, just two months after taking over cloud provider Cloud.com, Citrix also put its cloud management platform CloudStack [1] under the GPLv3.

The handover of the project from Citrix to the Apache Foundation in April 2012 was accompanied by a change in the license for the CloudStack platform to the Apache 2 license, while Citrix still remained the main sponsor. According to Citrix, the license change was meant to bring about the fastest possible dissemination of "open, interoperable cloud computing." To meet all of the Apache Foundation's requirements, numerous licenses went through checks, and other formalities had to be met. Thanks to the tremendous rate of development work, efforts were rewarded with the promotion to top-level Apache project [2].

Ubiquitous

Now, you have four open source Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions from which to choose, each with a different emphasis. The underlying technology (hypervisors), standards, and interfaces largely overlap, as do the supporters and sponsors involved. For example, along with Citrix, Microsoft, IBM, AMD, Google, Yahoo, and Facebook are backing CloudStack. CloudStack support from Microsoft is interesting, in that CloudStack will in future support Hyper-V, in addition to the Citrix Cloud Platform, Oracle VM, VMware (vSphere), KVM, and XenServer hypervisors.

The Citrix contribution to OpenStack seems strange because, within the company, the

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