The future is open cloud

Open-source software is increasingly at the heart of the biggest changes happening in enterprise computing all over the world. For me, open cloud is a perfect way to illustrate the benefits open source is bringing businesses and this is the major theme being discussed by some of the biggest names in the industry at the 2012 OpenStack APAC Conference in Beijing right now.

The business case for switching to or adopting cloud computing – and in particular, the open cloud – has never been stronger. Enterprises are realising reduced costs and increased flexibility without the risk of vendor lock-in. Open clouds let organisations move critical workloads to the cloud with the confidence that they can move from one vendor to another or onto a private cloud as they demand. This is because open source technology complies with established open standards.

As well as these business benefits, software like Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is helping devops massively reduce the complexity of cloud projects with deployment and service orchestration tools like Juju and MAAS. These sorts of technologies are streamlining the deployment process, making it quicker and simpler than ever to get applications running in the cloud.

The combination of Ubuntu and OpenStack has rapidly become the platform of choice for businesses building private cloud infrastructure.