Open Source Cloud Battles: Openstack Leveling Off as Cloudstack Interest Gains

Network World — OpenStack is the largest and most active open source cloud computing project, but interest in the platform has leveled off in the last quarter as momentum for competing project CloudStack continues to build.

Those are the findings of the latest report by a Chinese blogger who monitors the activity of open source cloud computing projects each month. Qingye (John) Jiang tracks four open source cloud computing projects in his blog using a Java program he created that pulls in records for every new discussion feed in the project's ecosystem, as well as on mailing lists and responses to comments.

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Eucalyptus and OpenNebula were the two original open source cloud platforms, which began before 2009. In 2010, both OpenStack and CloudStack started and in early 2012 CloudStack became a project independent from OpenStack.

During the past 18 months, OpenStack has garnered a lot of support, including from big-name vendors including Rackspace, Dell, HP, Cisco, VMware and Red Hat, among others. CloudStack, meanwhile, is backed largely by Citrix and other smaller players, while Eucalyptus is a privately held company that supports its own open source platform. OpenNebula is a fourth, smaller project.

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Given marketing resources that have been devoted to OpenStack, including the launch of a new independent foundation to govern the project, the project has gained significant momentum, but Qingye says that does seem to be leveling off last quarter of 2012. "In the past the OpenStack project had a much higher participation ratio than the others. However, during the past 6 months, the participation ratio of CloudStack and Eucalyptus are growing steadily, while the participation ratio of OpenStack is decreasing gradually," he notes.

Still, OpenStack and Eucalyptus have the broadest communities. Qingye estimates there are 2,500 accumulated community members over the life of the OpenStack project, with just slightly fewer (around 2,250) for Eucalyptus. CloudStack has less than 1,500 total, while OpenNebula has just more than 1,000.

CloudStack recently has had more active discussions, though, Qingye notes. "The number of active participants of CloudStack is somewhat less than OpenStack, but the volume of discussion (in terms of monthly number of threads and messages) of the two projects is on the same level. This indicates that the active members in the CloudStack club are talking more than those in the OpenStack club (on average)," he says.

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