Evaluating open-source cloud computing solutions

Cloud computing is becoming a mainstream technology in enterprise environment, promising more efficient use of hardware resources through virtualization, elastic computing facilities and secure management of user applications. Various cloud computing architectures are emerging and several commercial and open source products on the market advertise a rich feature-set. While commercial vendors try to give potential users the (not necessarily unbiased) tools to reason on the comparative advantages of their product, the open source community trusts users to make a well-informed selection on their own. In this paper we take a look at the open source cloud solutions and discuss the criteria that can be used to evaluate the stability, performance and features of open source clouds, and compare some available solutions. The evaluation criteria focus on three main components of a cloud solution - the storage layer, the virtualization layer, and the management layer. In addition, we explain the motivation for application of open source cloud solutions from an enterprise perspective, and discuss the potential benefits of these solutions for private cloud computing environments.