Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Michelle Boisvert.

Mention the words "open source" to IT pros interested in adopting cloud computing, and their ears likely will perk up. Open source software offers a solution to the vendor lock-in concerns many enterprises have with committing to a cloud platform. And cloud platforms like the OpenStack Foundation, which fosters 'coopitition' among seeming competitors in the hot cloud computing market, give companies the option to build interoperable open source clouds. But what options do enterprises have when seeking open source PaaS?

SearchCloudComputing spoke with Cédric Thomas, chief executive officer of OW2, a Paris-based, independent community focused on creating a code base of open source software for cloud computing. Similar to Apache and the OpenStack Foundation, OW2 concentrates on infrastructure software as well as the tools to develop, deploy and manage applications for approximately 100 projects over a 60-member community that's 22,000 developers strong...

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Marten Mickos.

Why is it that open source wins in infrastructure software? Why do websites run on Cassandra and MongoDB? Why are the biggest clouds in the world built on Linux and open source hypervisors? How come the leading cloud management platforms are open source?

The answer is surprisingly simple. The solution has emerged over the past two decades thanks to Apache, Linux, MySQL and other enormously popular software technologies. When you provide software to people who can and want to develop or maintain software themselves, the code needs to be open. If you provide software to a consumer or to a business, it’s about the service and the business benefits, not about openness per se...

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

OpenStack clouds and network management capabilities are converging. An example: Brocade has released a VCS fabric plugin, providing on-demand fabric provisioning capabilities to OpenStack-based clouds. Launched as a component to OpenStack Grizzly, the plugin was designed to expand on the native attributes of Brocade's VCS Fabric technology.

According to Brocade, the benefits of VCS on OpenStack are related to its technology's network automation, efficiency and elasticity combined with the ease of provisioning provided on OpenStack. The goal is enable customers to deploy network capacity and services in cloud-based data centers more quickly than with legacy network architectures and provisioning tools...

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Reuven Cohen.

Cloud interoperability and portability seems to be a hot topic these days. This topic is one that I have a bit of experience with. Back in 2008, I had the fortune, or possibly misfortune, of starting one of the first groups dedicated to the discussion of Cloud interoperability, aptly titled, “The Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum”. For a while this Google group was a popular forum for the discussion of various interop and standardization challenges, but it ultimately faded as politics, personalities and priorities shifted. Five years later, I thought I’d revisit the discussion.

A lot has changed since those early days, Amazon still dominates and many of the early cloud pioneers have long been acquired. In addition, a new crop of players have emerged as serious treats to the incumbent players in the space. The companies who were previously viewed as incumbent are now the challengers in this quickly evolving cloud battleground...

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

WSO2 today announced that two of the company’s executives will discuss cloud implementation trends and best practices at the Computerworld Open Business Conference (Computerworld OSBC). WSO2 Vice President of Technology Evangelism Chris Haddad will present, “A New IT Plan: Enterprise DevOps PaaS, APIs, and Ecosystems.” WSO2 Vice President of Product Marketing John Mathon will join other product marketing leaders in a panel discussion on the factors driving and inhibiting cloud adoption. WSO2 is a Platinum Sponsor of Computerworld OSBC, which will run April 29-30, 2013 at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco in San Francisco, CA.

Presentation: A New IT Plan: Enterprise DevOps PaaS, APIs, and Ecosystems

Today, organizations are implementing open source platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solutions, APIs, and open ecosystems to accelerate agility and empower developers to enable innovative business strategies. This session will explore how enterprise DevOps PaaS technologies can increase developer velocity and reduce iteration times, focusing on how open APIs are delivering significant business building blocks...

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Citrix and The Linux Foundation today announced that open source community development for the Xen(R) virtualization platform will become a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project. Leveraging its proven model of collaborative development for the new Xen Project(TM) initiative, The Linux Foundation will provide infrastructure, guidance and a collaborative network. The neutral, member-led community will help accelerate cross-industry innovation around the Xen Project hypervisor, bringing guidance and contributions from a more diverse group of technology leaders.

Over the past decade, collaborative innovations in cloud computing, security and advanced processor support have made Xen the most scalable and secure hypervisor in the industry. It is these innovations that have led to the adoption of Xen and Citrix XenServer(R) as the platforms for powering approximately two-thirds of the public cloud revenue in the world. The initial set of supporters demonstrates the broad reach the technology has had in the marketplace. With more than 10 years of development and in use by more than 10 million users, the open source technology attracts contributions from organizations such as Amazon, AMD, Cambridge University, Citrix, Fujitsu, Intel, National Security Agency (NSA), Oracle and SUSE...

Grazed from Datamation. Author: Sean Michael Kerner.

While working for NASA as a cloud architect, Joshua McKenty helped to build the Nebula compute project and start the OpenStack open source cloud platform. McKenty has since gone on to found Piston Cloud computing, which launched its first public release in September of 2011. Piston is now updating its OpenStack solution in a 2.0 release that aims improve and ease the management of cloud deployments.

"We are still the better, faster, easier way to get up and running with OpenStack," McKenty told Datamation. McKenty's vision for an enterprise OpenStack company has been greeted by an influx of $12.5 million in venture capital. Among Piston's investors is networking giant Cisco Systems. "When we said we were an OpenStack company, people assumed that what is in our product is OpenStack and that's it," McKenty said...

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Joe Onisick.

The Apache Software Foundation announced in late March that CloudStack is now a top-level project. This is a promotion from CloudStack's incubator status, where it had lived after being released as open source by Citrix. This promotion provides additional encouragement to companies and developers looking to contribute to the project, because it validates the CloudStack community and demonstrates ongoing support under the Apache Software Foundation.

CloudStack provides a complete IaaS software suite for private, public and hybrid cloud environments. It's based on a product called Cloud.com, which Citrix acquired in 2011. CloudStack comes from a proprietary code base that was used in production before being acquired...

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

OpenStack is the open source success story of the contemporary era, a project that started as a gleam in the eye of Rackspace executives who wanted to compete with Amazon, and rapidly grew into a project with its own governing board and foundation.

It consists today of numerous distinct parts, all of them making progress on the problems that confront their individual areas of cloud computing. It's been criticized for lacking the beneficent dictator who, it used to be believed, was a necessary force behind a successful open source project. That was before the procedures of an open source development process -- and the ability to govern those seemingly chaotic procedures -- were well understood. The Apache Software Foundation and Linux kernel development process supplied the models...