As I travel the world talking with enterprises, service providers, or attending/speaking at conferences about Cloud computing, I find that there are many incredible open source projects that have not yet crossed-over into the mainstream. While I’d love to write about Red Hat’s Aeolus or VoltDB, I thought I’d stick to three solutions I find useful or potential within building a public or private Cloud.
RunDeck is a GitHub project sponsored by DTO Solutions and is distributed under the Apache License v2. DTO Solutions is a consulting organization that helps companies to automate their infrastructure and to take advantage of DevOps. RunDeck is complimentary to Puppet, Chef, and more. Ok, Ok, there is a bit of overlap with Puppet since they purchased MCollective but I wouldn’t call them competitive. Essentially, RunDeck is a control tool that specializes in job automation and scheduling.
LogStash is a GitHub project that is distributed under the Apache License v2. It is a tool that manages events and logs that allows the parsing, storage, and searching of all your log data. Yes, LogStash is an open source alternative to Splunk and has the ability to feed the innovative commercial Cloud based logging platform, Loggly. LogStash provides a easy to use web interface and comprises highly configurable LogStash agents.
oVirt is an open source project led by Red Hat, Cisco, IBM, Intel, NetApp, and Suse and is distributed under the Apache License v2. oVirt is a complete management virtualization platform for Linux based KVM virtualization. Although it hasn’t officially been released yet (oVirt can be built from source) it’s an interesting project as it strikes VMware at the heart of their offering, vCenter. KVM is an awesome virtualization technology, but it will not displace VMware or Hyper-V unless it is manageable and easy to use, thus oVirt.
Let me know what other Open Source solutions you find helpful in building your Cloud and which ones should be on everyone’s mind.
