While there happens to be several commercial offerings floating in the market, promising to help in building world class cloud infrastructures, open source cloud computing solutions is worth looking at. These are certainly much more than mere “alternatives” to their commercial counterparts. In several cases, these open source applications were indeed the first of their kind to have arrived.
Open source cloud computing offers many advantages with respect to catering to cloud computing needs. Depending on the scale of operations, users can realize considerable savings when turning to one or several of these applications. In addition, once a business takes to these cloud computing solutions they can also find themselves competing with large business enterprises who have taken to the same software.
What makes these software solutions so attractive? Well, many of them have wide user bases. Because the software implementation barrier is low, more number of people are taking to it. Typically, most of these open source projects are highly innovative with release cycles that are nothing short of aggressive and that continue to push the technology ahead. Such is the case that often, the upcoming release cycle is actually based on the business needs of the real world.