OpenStack

OpenStack is a free, open source collection of software that turns a room full of ordinary servers into a cloud. Teams can create virtual machines, disks, networks and storage on demand, through a web dashboard or an API, much as they would on AWS, but on hardware their organization controls. It started in 2010 as a joint project of Rackspace and NASA, and today it is developed by a large open community.

It is made of separate services that work together, each with its own code name. Nova runs virtual machines, Neutron handles networking, Cinder provides disks, Swift stores objects, Keystone manages identities and permissions, and Horizon is the web dashboard. New versions come out on a six-month cycle.

Telecom operators, research centers like CERN, universities and some regional cloud providers use it to run private clouds or their own public cloud services, often to keep data in a specific country or to avoid depending on a single vendor. The price is complexity: installing, upgrading and operating OpenStack well takes a skilled team, which is why many organizations buy it packaged and supported by a company such as Red Hat or Canonical.