7 Best Open Source Cloud Platforms for Enterprises

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With so many things to take care of, such as server space, development environment, security, software stack, software updates, and hardware maintenance, overall platform maintenance costs tend to be significant.

Businesses that develop and deploy applications must allocate significant resources to keep their platforms running. Otherwise, it is a resource that can be utilized for software development purposes.

That’s why the need for a cloud platform solution arose. These solutions employ a cloud computing model and provide everything developers need to get their work done, from hosted development environments and database tools to complete application management capabilities.

Developers working within a cloud platform have access to all the resources they need to build, deploy, and launch software applications. For enterprises, cloud platforms can provide a scalable foundation for new applications that need to be delivered in a short period of time. Our pay-as-you-grow model eliminates the need for long-term investments in on-premises platforms.

Why open source?

Now that we have discussed the benefits of cloud and traditional on-premises platforms, the next question is why open source cloud platforms are a better choice than proprietary cloud platforms.

The most obvious answer is cost. Licensing proprietary solutions always comes with a hefty price tag. Another key benefit is the flexibility to choose from a variety of frameworks, clouds, and services.

Proprietary platforms, on the other hand, may connect users to tools and services owned by that platform. In return, they offer certain benefits, such as commitment to SLAs (service level agreements) and freedom from hurdles such as testing and integration, but these benefits rarely outweigh the benefits of openness.

Below you’ll find a selection of enterprise open source cloud platforms that dominate the market today.

cloud foundry

Cloud Foundry was originally developed by VMware (now owned by Pivotal Software) and is unique in that it is available as an open source, standalone software application and is independent of cloud providers. Deploy on VMware vSphere or other cloud infrastructures such as HP Helion, Azure, or AWS. Alternatively, you can choose to host it yourself on an OpenStack server.

Cloud Foundry facilitates runtime and framework support by using buildpacks. Every time you push your app, the Cloud Foundry application runtime chooses the most convenient buildpack for your app. The buildpack then compiles the app and prepares it to launch.

Cloud Foundry is designed to provide rapid application development and deployment through a highly scalable architecture and DevOps-friendly workflows. Its language support includes Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, Go, and more.

However, to be a good fit for Cloud Foundry, we recommend that your projects follow the Twelve-Factor application standard, a methodology specifically designed for developing optimal Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) apps. I will.

Udemy has a great course on developing for the cloud using Cloud Foundry.

WSO2

If you’re serious about SOA, you’re bound to have to deal with a lot of internal and external APIs. This is a scenario where WSO2 shines thanks to its API manager that can handle the complete API lifecycle. WSO2 provides compliance with most requirements that clients can submit, including version control, API documentation, and SSL offloading.

WSO2 uses a store concept where developers can search, try, and evaluate APIs. Deployment is simple and easy, and provides many options for controlling the flow of your API. It also provides automatic recovery functionality in case of endpoint suspension.

All these qualities are aimed at reducing time to market, simplifying cost management, and overall improving business process agility.

A big advantage of WSO2 API Manager is that it easily integrates with WSO2 Identity Server, an API-driven IAM (Identity and Access Manager) solution. This integration provides an easy-to-use platform for authentication across cloud environments.

Cloudization

Cloudify is an orchestration framework designed to model applications and services while automating their lifecycle.

This includes the ability to deploy to any cloud environment or data center and perform ongoing maintenance. It also provides tools to monitor all aspects of deployed applications, detect fault conditions, and resolve them manually or automatically.

One of Cloudify’s most notable features is TOSCA-based blueprint modeling. This innovation allows developers to use YAML to blueprint the topology of their applications.

YAML is a human-readable data serialization language used to write definitions based on the TOSCA specification. The TOSCA specification provides developers with a standardized way to describe the interconnections between applications, systems, and cloud infrastructure components.

Cloudify cloud orchestration provides a solid foundation for IT governance and security, allowing users to enforce access restrictions across different roles and privilege levels.

To communicate with external services such as Kubernetes containers, cloud services (AWS, Azure, vSphere, OpenStack), and configuration management tools (Puppet, Ansible, Chef), Cloudify uses a set of official plugins, but other Many services are supported by generic plugins. Existing plugins.

open shift

OpenShift is a Kubernetes-based platform with a flexible, lightning-fast installer and extensive API support that allows developers to extend the platform based on their needs.

It’s built with security in mind, and we’ll demonstrate that with an example. Containers are expected to run as a non-root user, otherwise OpenShift requires an explicit override to run them.

Using Kubernetes requires a significant number of servers, and there is a certain learning curve to master it. For this reason, this platform is not suitable for small deployments unless there is a possibility of moving to larger deployments in the near future.

OpenShift users emphasize the quick installation and configuration steps and easy maintenance of modules and gear. Another advantage is the fact that it has its own Git repository. What they don’t like very much is that the logs are difficult to read and interpret. Especially when a failure occurs while uploading a project, it is difficult to understand where the problem is.

crane

Rede Globo, the world’s second largest commercial television network, launched Tsuru as a Docker-based PaaS (platform as a service) product that allows you to orchestrate and run applications in production. It is an open source multi-provisioner platform developed by Globo.com that supports sites with millions of users.

Tsuru users affirm that it significantly reduces time to market without sacrificing simplicity, high availability, security, or stability. You can run it on a variety of cloud infrastructures, public or private, as long as your Docker machine supports it.

It also supports almost all available programming languages, giving developers the freedom to choose according to their preference.

Tsuru allows you to use a variety of data stores, including SQL and NoSQL databases, or in-memory alternatives such as Memcached and Redis.

Just choose the one you like and connect it to the app. You can choose to manage your app using the command line or web interface, and later deploy via Git. Tsuru Infrastructure handles every detail.

staccato

Stackato is a multilingual PaaS product based on Cloud Foundry and Docker that runs on cloud infrastructure and serves as a platform for launching applications.

Stackato users say it provides an agile and robust application platform that helps increase productivity for both cloud administrators and developers.

It is ideal for enterprise cloud deployments, combining the flexibility of directly accessing VMs within the cloud infrastructure with the automatic configuration provided by a full-featured PaaS.

Supported cloud infrastructures include HP Cloud Services, Citrix XenServer, AWS, OpenStack, VMware, and more.

With Stackato, each application has its own Linux container (LXC), ensuring efficient and secure sharing of resources. Its service scope consists of: Helion control plane. Stackato uses it to communicate with the underlying cloud and manage the service lifecycle.

Helion Service Manager, a repository of add-in services available to applications. Helion Cloud Foundry is an elastic runtime designed to simplify app hosting and development.

Helion Code Engine is a continuous delivery service that integrates with private or public Git repositories, and the Helion Stackato console is a web interface that manages all Helion Cloud functionality.

alibaba

Although rarely mentioned when talking about open source cloud platforms or PaaS, Alibaba cloud computing business is rapidly growing and has already captured 50% of China’s public cloud market and serves markets outside of China. I am eager to learn how to deliver. .

For example, we have begun offering billing support in USD for 168 countries and designing services specifically tailored for international markets.

The cloud platform services included in Alibaba’s services include many free features, such as container services for Docker and Kubernetes, Container Registry, Auto Scaling, and DataWorks, a secure environment for offline data development.

Its services are well-documented and come with everything you need to quickly start migrating your apps to the cloud, including many tutorial videos. With Alibaba, you can start building right away without investing a single dollar by following a few simple steps.

Finally…

Fortunately for all developers, openness rules the cloud world. A few years ago, competition around container technologies (Docker, Kubernetes, Mesos, Nomad, ECS, etc.) threatened to divide the market into watertight compartments, creating significant risk each time a platform selection had to be made. I did.

But while there are now more platforms to choose from, the differences between today’s open source options are often small details, such as different cost structures, different management tools, and different approaches to security.

In other words, if you choose an open source cloud platform today and are not happy with it, you can switch to another cloud platform tomorrow and not be hit by the costs.

With the information provided here, you can forget about server capacity, middleware, frameworks, virtual machines, data stores, etc. and choose the platform that meets your needs.

Once you’re free from all of this, you’ll be able to focus all your resources and all your attention on the one thing that really matters to you. It’s about delivering great applications to users as quickly as possible and making them happy. in use.

Also explore cloud platform free tiers and credits here.