OpenStack types

Wandering the exhibition floor of an OpenStack Summit can be extremely daunting to the OpenStack newcomer. Every major IT company appears to have some sort of OpenStack solution, and it's often difficult to decipher what is actually being offered. The best way to explain these various OpenStack offerings is by breaking them down into four distinct types. See Figure 1.2.

• Project: The OpenStack project can be found at http://github.com/openstack. This contains the publicly available source code that thousands of developers are actively committing to throughout the day. It's free to download and install yourself.
• Distributions/appliances: OpenStack is incredibly complex due to its many moving parts, and therefore difficult to deploy, manage, and support. To reduce complexity, companies and communities alike create OpenStack distributions or "appliances." These are easy, turnkey approaches to deploying OpenStack. They typically provide opinionated methods for deployment by using popular configuration management tools such as Ansible, Puppet, or Chef. They may install OpenStack directly from the project source code on GitHub, or via packages that have been developed by popular operating system communities like Ubuntu and Red Hat.
• Hosted private clouds: Customers looking for the security and reliability of a private OpenStack cloud without the need to manage it themselves should consider a hosted private cloud solution. These solutions typically use an existing OpenStack distribution and also include 24/7 customer support, with guaranteed uptime via an SLA (Service Level Agreement).
• Public clouds: There are quite a few public clouds built on OpenStack software. These include Rackspace and OVH Public Cloud. Similar to Amazon Web Services, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform, an OpenStack Public Cloud solution resides in the provider's data centers. The provider is responsible for the management of the environment, which is used by multiple customers on shared hardware.