Last night at the Silicon Valley Cloud Computing Group hosted by Box.net, David Nalley of CloudStack told an overflow crowd that open source ideally fits the requirements of cloud computing, allowing users to solve their own problems and avoid cloud lock in. He outlined the comprehensive set of options now available for building an open source cloud.
Nalley emphasized in particular the need for a tool chain, a set of tools for provisioning, configuration, monitoring, and automation. Without these tools working together, system admins could not possibly manage all of the virtual machines deployed in a cloud.
Here’s a list of the open source projects Nalley mentioned in the talk broken down by function.
Hypervisors: Xen, KVM, Virtual Box, OpenVZ, LXC
(Xen and KVM are the most widespread)
Management: CloudStack, Eucalyptus, OpenStack, Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, Abiquo
PaaS: Cloud Foundry, OpenShift, Stratos
Storage: GlusterFS, CloudFS, CEPH, OpenStack Object Storage (SWIFT), Sheepdog
Cloud APIs: jclouds, libcloud, deltacloud
Provisioning Tools: Cobbler, Kickstart, Spacewalk, Crowbar
Configuration Management: Chef, Puppet
Monitoring: Cacti, Nagios, OpenNMS, Zabbix, Zenoss
Automation/Orchestration: AutomateID, Capistrano, RunDeck, Func, MCollective
For details, see the slide deck at http://www.slideshare.net/socializedsoftware/crash-course-in-open-source-cloud-computing-8279535.
Jim Downey 
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