Bossie Awards 2013: The best open source data center and cloud software

Open source is changing everything in the data center — even the hardware. While Facebook’s Open Compute Project is brewing better designs for servers and networks, other open source projects are remaking the databases, application platforms, and virtualization layers for a new generation of apps. Wouldn’t you know it, the next generation of tools for managing this “cloud” infrastructure is coming from open source too. 

If you like the ease of resource provisioning that Amazon EC2 provides but you work for a corporation that’s still frightened of anything outside the firewall, then OpenStack may be for you. An open source cloud management stack with heavyweight commercial backing, OpenStack provides a management GUI and API layer to manage data center resources much the same way Amazon does.

OpenStack is divided into modules for managing compute, storage, and network resources; it also provides utilities for managing shared services such as identities and virtual machine images. The question of whether corporations will embrace cloud infrastructure isn’t “if,” it’s “when,” and when that time comes, OpenStack is shaping up to be the leading open source option.

— Steven Nuñez

Even if OpenStack has the size and momentum, Eucalyptus is the open source leader in hybrid cloud capability. Eucalyptus lets you build an in-house private cloud that can be driven with the same tools and scripts you use to operate Amazon Web Services. Eucalyptus commands can be used to drive AWS instances too.

This compatibility makes Eucalyptus an excellent development platform and test bed for apps that will be (seamlessly) deployed to AWS and vice versa. New features in Version 3.3 this year include AWS-compatible Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing, and CloudWatch monitoring.

In hybrid scenarios, these new services will allow you to programmatically collect operational metrics from both Amazon and Eucalyptus and shift workloads between the cloud and on-premise as needed.

— James R. Borck

Cloud Foundry is the open source PaaS offering from the newly formed Pivotal. It can be used to deploy your applications on a variety of infrastructures, including Amazon Web Services, OpenStack, and vSphere. It supports Java, Ruby, and Node applications out of the box, but if you’re working with .Net, you can use Iron Foundry, another open source project built on Cloud Foundry.

In addition to the open source version, Pivotal offers a hosted version (currently in beta) that deploys your apps to Amazon Web Services where you can easily bind a selection of services, including MongoDB, RabbitMQ, and JMeter load testing. Enterprises are already paying attention: GE, IBM, Intel, and Baidu are among those that have already adopted the software.

— Jonathan Freeman

An agile and blazing-fast graph database, Neo4j can be used in a variety of different ways, including social applications, recommendation engines, fraud detection, resource authorization, and data center network management. Neo4j has continued its steady progress with both performance improvements (streaming of query results) and improved clustering/HA support.

— Michael Scarlett