A State-of-art Comparison of Opensource IaaS Cloud Softwares

I. Introduction A recent 2014 survey indicates cloud adoption by the enterprises continues unabated to about 94%[1]. These organisations are either running their applications on cloud or have started building their own cloud. Some of the popular commercial IaaS providers are Amazon Web Services(AWS), GoGrid, Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engine, IBM Smart Cloud, Rackspace Open Cloud, HP enterprise converged infrastructure. These providers own infrastructure and rent computing resources to consumers on pay-as-you-go basis. This model of computation known as " public cloud " computation is suitable for start-up companies, individual project developers and organization having shortage of resources as they need not invest in the infrastructure. However public cloud has its own drawbacks such as security[2] and cost of rent. Most of the enterprises which have existing infrastructure and want to leverage the benefits of cloud can opt for building their own cloud environment i.e " private cloud ". Further enterprises having their " private cloud " can draw additional resources when required from the " public cloud " providers by constructing a " hybrid cloud ". A Cloud Management Software(CMS) is required to build the cloud environment which provides the functionality of creating, provisioning and managing of virtual machines known as Infrastructure-as-service(IaaS) cloud. There are commercial vendor who build and support cloud infrastructure but one of the viable option would be to use opensource CMS and build own cloud. The open source software has its own advantages such as no license cost, strong user and developer community, innovative technology, quick release cycles, open standards i.e no vendor lock-in, transparency and they are based on the real world generic business needs. Some of the opensource CMS available for building cloud infrastructure are Nimbus, Abicloud, OpenStack, OpenNebula, Eucalyptus and CloudStack. Thus enterprises can use freely available open source CMS and efficiently utilize the existing infrastructure by creating their own private cloud, further expand their horizon by building a hybrid cloud. This is motivating enterprise, universities towards opensource CMS, but the difficulty is to select form the many available CMS. According to survey[3] Openstack is the most popular CMS followed by CloudStack, Opennebula and then Eucalyptus. Hence this manuscript presents simple and easy to understand the state-of-art of these four CMS. It provides comparison in terms of their architecture and features. The motive is to aid the decision of choosing CMS based on the requirements and compatibility with existing infrastructure. II. Literature …