Open Source VMware vSphere Alternatives

OpenStack is a collection of interoperable components that can be deployed together to provide computing, networking, and storage resources. Once deployed, those resources are reached by end users through programmable APIs rather than a fixed console.

This particular repository is not that code. It represents OpenStack as a collection of git submodules, with the repositories for individual components hosted separately, and it is intended to be used in a read-only manner.

The superproject exists to answer a question that is otherwise awkward to answer.

• Tested combinations: any commit here points at a set of component commits that were explicitly tested with each other.
• Zuul gating: the continuous integration system gates all contained projects in an effective single timeline.
• Submodule tracking: Gerrit updates the superproject whenever a subproject changes, capturing the sequence Zuul produced.
• Component sources: the working repositories for each component live in the OpenStack namespace on opendev.
• Read-only intent: commits are not made here directly, since the superproject records history rather than holding it.

Anyone who needs to pin a deployment to a known-good combination of component versions can take it from here instead of reconstructing it commit by commit across every project. Documentation for the individual components, the contributor process, and the governance model is maintained separately by the OpenStack community.

Cozystack is a free platform and framework for building clouds. Point it at a pile of servers and it turns them into a system with a REST API for spawning tenant services, which removes the job of assembling that stack by hand every time a team or a customer needs one.

It is a CNCF Sandbox project, originally built and sponsored by Aenix, released under Apache 2.0 and versioned according to semantic versioning. A web interface sits over the API, so operators and tenants are not limited to editing configuration files.

The services it hands out cover most of what a small cloud is expected to sell.

• Kubernetes clusters: spawn them through the API instead of building each one by hand.
• Databases: offer database instances as a service to teams or paying customers.
• Virtual machines: run the workloads that do not belong in a container.
• Load balancers: publish tenant services without wiring the network for each one.
• HTTP caching: put a caching layer in front of hosted sites and APIs.

The documentation describes three ways teams use it. As the backend of a public cloud, as a private cloud driven by an infrastructure as code approach, or simply as a Kubernetes distribution for bare metal when the rest of the platform is not wanted. Getting started guides, troubleshooting and the roadmap live on the project website, weekly community meetings and a Telegram group carry the discussion, and companies offering commercial support are listed on the same site.

Spinifex recreates the AWS service surface on infrastructure you control. Software written for EC2, EBS, S3, VPC and IAM keeps working unchanged, because the AWS CLI, the SDKs and Terraform talk to Spinifex the way they talk to AWS. What changes is where the workload runs, not what it is.

Every API call is authenticated at a gateway, published to a NATS subject and answered by whichever daemon claims it. Daemons hold no state, so scaling out means starting more. There is no etcd, no Kubernetes and no external control plane, so a cluster keeps serving through disconnection.

The platform is assembled from several Go services and the open source pieces around them.

• Spinifex: VM orchestration over QEMU driven through the QMP interface, with EKS, ECS, ECR and RDS built on that same instance layer.
• Viperblock: block storage with write ahead logs on local NVMe, replicated across nodes and exposed over NBD or virtio-blk.
• Predastore: S3 compatible object storage with SigV4 auth, multipart uploads and Reed-Solomon erasure coding across nodes.
• Northstar: authoritative DNS for cluster service discovery and public records, with zones kept as readable TOML files.
• Networking: OVN backs VPC networking and security groups, while HAProxy and nginx serve the load balancer APIs.

The same platform deploys in three shapes, a partner Neocloud with GPU capacity, a multi-node cluster in your own data center, or an edge site running air gapped. It is Go and AGPL 3.0, with a 72 hour hosted sandbox for pointing an existing workload at it first.