Bossie Awards 2014: The best open source data center and cloud software

Slowly but surely, the shape of the data center is changing — and maybe not so slowly. The push is on to close the distance between development and production, and to bridge the gap between private data centers and the cloud. These open source projects are leading the way.

One of the most striking developments in the cloud world has been the re-creation of proprietary cloud architectures — the AWS APIs, for instance — via open source. One of the latest projects, AppScale, reproduces Google App Engine using nothing but open source components. What’s more, it runs on a wide variety of existing cloud hosts, ranging from Amazon EC2 to Microsoft Azure to, yes, Google Compute Engine. Apps written in Python, Go, PHP, and Java are all supported. AppScale (the company) has promoted AppScale (the project) as a way to back up apps from Google App Engine or to provide an easy exit strategy from Google’s cloud. But it’s clear the project has a lot to offer even outside of that.

— Serdar Yegulalp

InfoWorld’s Best of Open Source Awards for 2014 celebrate more than 130 excellent open source projects in nearly every corner of computing. Follow these links to more open source winners:

Bossie Awards 2014: The best open source applications

Bossie Awards 2014: The best open source application development software

Bossie Awards 2014: The best open source big data tools

Bossie Awards 2014: The best open source data center and cloud software

Bossie Awards 2014: The best open source desktop and mobile software

Bossie Awards 2014: The best open source networking and security software