Open Source Cloud

Any cloud solution or service which is built utilizing open-source technologies is known as Open Source Cloud. It includes private, hybrid or public cloud model offering IaaS, PaaS, XaaS or SaaS built as well as completely operated on open-source software.

The Open Source Cloud is developed and designed utilizing the different open-source software and technologies, including -

-- Open-source business applications and workflow
-- Open-source DBMS, Operating System as well as software development
-- Open-source firmware hardware
-- Virtualization stack (Virtualization management, Hypervisor)

Furthermore, Open Source Cloud might be referred as cloud service, providing open-source service or software to the businesses or end users. Cloud hosting providers or businesses have an option to tailor the open-source cloud services as per their requirement that is usually prohibited in the cloud models (closed-source).

Generally, open-source cloud services are interoperable through a back-end platform and they could be easily migrated to different IT environment or infrastructure.

Virtual Box, Open Stack and Open Nebula are some of the common instances of Open Source Cloud.

Different Types of Cloud Services -

Following are the different kinds of common cloud services -

-- Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) - Google Docs, Dropbox and Salesforce.com are some of the SaaS. Software providing web-based services or applications/network. Almost everything is distracted away from user and users do not have to understand on what Operating System application is functioning as well as how many sources are allotted to it. Users do not need to handle the software upgradation or worry about the fundamental dependencies.

-- Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) - Users can check the storage, network and compute resources; however, underlying information is still abstracted. For instance, they can spin up the 'instance' utilizing Amazon EC2 or Apache CloudStack with equivalent of two Xeon CPUs (Central Processing Unit) with 4 GB RAM, 2.0 GHz, public IP address and 100 GB storage.

-- Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) - PaaS is a stack or service that look after middleware, orchestration and infrastructure in order to permit developers to concentrate on the creation of application. It abstracts the infra layer so that developers could make an application as per their framework/language without getting down in the implementation details, such as underlying OS or Operating System. Engine Yard, Google App Engine (GAE) and OpenShift are some of the instances of PaaS.