A Comparison of Open Source Cloud Computing Platforms
This is a very brief comparison of some popular cloud computing tools. All of the following platforms share many features, in that they are open-source, and provide ways of managing private, public, or hybrid clouds with virtual network and multi-tenancy support. Each platform also has support for different hypervisors for their compute component, either through their core modules or through other open-source projects. All of these platforms offer similar functionality, where your choice of platform may be dependent on how well it integrates with external services like Amazon Web Services(AWS), its list of supported hypervisors, its open-source licence, or its implementation language, rather than its core functionality which is similar across all discussed platforms.
Eucalyptus
Eucalyptus (Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs to Useful Systems) is an open-source software infrastructure that implements IaaS-style cloud platform. Eucalyptus began as a research project at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and became a for-profit business called Eucalyptus Systems in 2009. Eucalyptus’s selling point is it’s ability to build Amazon Web Services compatible private and hybrid clouds. Eucalyptus Systems made a formal agreement with Amazon Web Services in 2012, allowing administrators to move instances between a Eucalyptus private cloud and the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to create a hybrid cloud.
- Licence: GNU Public Licence v3
CloudStack
CloudStack is a project of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). The project develops open source software for deploying public and private IaaS clouds. It is written primarily in Java. Apart from having its own API, the platform supports CloudBridge for Amazon EC2, which enables converting an Amazon API into a CloudStack API.
- Licence: Apache License, Version 2.0
OpenNebula
OpenNebula is an open-source management platform to build IaaS private, public and hybrid clouds and is available for most major Linux Distros. It provides GUI tools for administators, virtual network mangement, file storage and machine image management.
- Licence: Apache License, Version 2.0
OpenStack
OpenStack is a set of software tools for building and managing cloud computing platforms for public and private IaaS clouds.
- Licence: Apache License, Version 2.0
The core architecture of OpenStack is made up of several open source projects:
- – Compute (Nova)
- – Object storage (Swift)
- – Block Storage (Cinder)
- – Networking (Neutron)
- – Browser GUI (Horizon)
- – Identity Services (Keystone)
- – Machine Disk Image Retrieval (Glance)
I chose to use Openstack for my own project due to the availabilty of a software package called DevStack which is a series of extensible scripts which will build a complete OpenStack environment quite easily on a local machine (either physical or virtual).
References:
[1]"Build the future of Open Infrastructure.", OpenStack, 2019. [Online]. Available: https://www.openstack.org/. [Accessed: 30- Jan- 2019].
[2]"Understanding OpenStack", Redhat.com, 2019. [Online]. Available: https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/openstack. [Accessed: 30- Jan- 2019].
[3]"What is OpenStack?", Opensource.com, 2019. [Online]. Available: https://opensource.com/resources/what-is-openstack. [Accessed: 30- Jan- 2019].
[4]"OpenStack Docs: DevStack", Docs.openstack.org, 2019. [Online]. Available: https://docs.openstack.org/devstack/latest/. [Accessed: 30- Jan- 2019].
[5]"Key Features - OpenNebula", OpenNebula, 2019. [Online]. Available: https://opennebula.org/key-features/. [Accessed: 30- Jan- 2019].
[6]"Eucalyptus: An Open Source Infrastructure for Cloud Computing | USENIX", Usenix.org, 2019. [Online]. Available: https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa-09/eucalyptus-open-source-infrastructure-cloud-computing. [Accessed: 30- Jan- 2019].
[7]"Eucalyptus Systems – UCSB Office of Technology & Industry Alliances", Tia.ucsb.edu, 2019. [Online]. Available: https://tia.ucsb.edu/about-tia/success-stories/eucalyptus-systems/. [Accessed: 30- Jan- 2019].
[8]"What is Eucalyptus? - Definition from WhatIs.com", SearchITChannel, 2019. [Online]. Available: https://searchitchannel.techtarget.com/definition/Eucalyptus. [Accessed: 30- Jan- 2019].
[9]"eucalyptus/eucalyptus", GitHub, 2019. [Online]. Available: https://github.com/eucalyptus/eucalyptus/wiki. [Accessed: 30- Jan- 2019].
[10]"Apache Cloudstack", Apache Cloudstack, 2019. [Online]. Available: https://cloudstack.apache.org/. [Accessed: 30- Jan- 2019].
[11]"apache/cloudstack", GitHub, 2019. [Online]. Available: https://github.com/apache/cloudstack. [Accessed: 30- Jan- 2019].
[12]s. Vadim Truksha, "Cloud platform comparison: CloudStack, Eucalyptus, vCloud Director and OpenStack", Network World, 2019. [Online]. Available: https://www.networkworld.com/article/2189981/tech-primers/cloud-platform-comparison--cloudstack--eucalyptus--vcloud-director-and-openstack.html. [Accessed: 30- Jan- 2019].
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