What Linux virtualization offers you in the cloud
Over the years, Linux has become the first choice for developing cloud-based solutions. Many successful public cloud providers use Linux virtualization to power their underlying infrastructure. For example, Amazon, the largest IaaS cloud provider uses Xen virtualization to power their EC2 offering and similarly it's KVM that powers Digital Ocean. Digital Ocean is the third largest cloud provider in the world. Linux virtualizations are also dominating the private cloud arena.
The following is a list of open source cloud software that uses Linux virtualization for building IaaS software:
- Openstack: A fully open source cloud operating system, this consists of several open source sub-projects that provide all the building blocks to create an IaaS cloud. KVM (Linux Virtualization) is the most-used (and best-supported) hypervisor in OpenStack deployments. It's governed by the vendor-agnostic OpenStack Foundation. How to build an OpenStack cloud using KVM is explained in detail in Chapter 6, Virtual Machine Lifecycle Management and Chapter 7, Templates and Snapshots.
- Cloudstack: This is another open source Apache Software Foundation (ASF) controlled cloud project to build and manage highly-scalable multi-tenant IaaS cloud, which is fully compatible with EC2/S3 APIs. Although it supports all top-level Linux hypervisors. Most Cloudstack users choose Xen, as it is tightly integrated with Cloudstack.
- Eucalyptus: This is an AWS-compatible private cloud software for organizations to reduce their public cloud cost and regain control over security and performance. It supports both Xen and KVM as a computing resources provider.
