The Linux Foundation – Guide to the Open Cloud

Never before has the IT industry faced such a colossal rate of change and innovation as it does today. The pace is even more prominent in emerging technologies such as big data, the internet of things, and cloud computing. At the heart of all of these trends is open source. Open source has enabled both the mass collaboration and massive scaling that is driving cloud technologies. If I may borrow one of my colleague’s idioms, he puts it as “software is eating the world”. And he’s right.

So what do we do to understand how each of these technologies plays with one other? How do we keep track of the pace of each open-source project, or what space it competes in? The Linux Foundation has published a research document that has done this for you. In a very consumable and high-level PDF, they’ve summarised all the open-source technologies in today’s cloud ecosystem. They profile hypervisors, Cloud OSes, IaaS, PaaS, Provisioning & Configuration Management, and more. Wow! Thank you LF! This document is helpful for both the non-technical, and very technical folks. It’s easily consumable by either.

If you’re having trouble keeping up with it all, head over to the linuxfoundation.org, and download this PDF. You’ll hit a registration wall, but they haven’t spammed me at all. In the interest of keeping the credit with them, I’ll only show a small excerpt below. You can also head to www.linux.com/directory/open-cloud to view the profile information separately.