SUSE, OpenStack and Open Source

Pete Chadwick and Doug Jarvis of SUSE stopped by quite a while ago to discuss cloud application stacks and why the company is so heavily involved with the OpenStack community. The story behind the story was that SUSE wanted to address the then-recent move by Citrix, another OpenStack member, to submit its own stack of technologies for a cloud computing environment.

At this point, OpenStack is doing its best to wrestle market attention away from cloud computing frameworks such as Eucalyptus, Microsoft's Azure, Citrix's CloudStack and a few others. That organization does its best to point out that their stack is developed and supported by a large community of end user organizations as well as providers of hardware, software and services and is not owned or directed by a single supplier.

SUSE would go on to put forward the notion that cloud computing and open source software are perfect companions for organizations that look to the use of cloud computing to lower their overall costs of IT infrastructure, offer freedom to deploy its workloads wherever appropriate, and avoid being locked into a single vendors hardware or software products. To that end, SUSE is happy to point out that it is the only member of OpenStack that supports every major hypervisor.

Is your organization taking whether a cloud computing framework is open source or not into consideration when making a selection of cloud computing services?