OpenStack
Open-source cloud software for running compute, storage and networking as a private or public cloud.
- Verified facts
- 5 of 5
- Alternatives ranked
- 2
- Approved reviews
- 0
- Visits sent from here
- 0
About OpenStack
OpenStack is a collection of open-source services that turn racks of servers into a cloud. Its components handle virtual machines, bare-metal servers, block and object storage, software-defined networking, identity, images and orchestration, and everything is driven through APIs, CLI tools or the Horizon web dashboard. Organisations use it to build private clouds on their own hardware, and many hosting providers run public clouds on it; the project says it manages more than 40 million cores worldwide. It is free under the Apache 2.0 licence and supported by the OpenInfra Foundation, with new releases twice a year. Because it is modular, teams pick only the services they need, but deploying and upgrading it is a serious engineering task. Many companies use a commercial distribution or a managed provider from the OpenStack Marketplace rather than running the upstream code themselves. Small setups are usually better served by Proxmox VE.
Best for: Telcos, hosting providers and large enterprises building their own AWS-style cloud.
Pros and cons
What works
- Free, Apache-licensed and vendor-neutral
- Covers VMs, bare metal, storage and networking behind one set of APIs
- Proven at very large scale, with many commercial distributions
- Modular, so you deploy only the services you need
Why people leave
- Complex to deploy, operate and upgrade
- Needs a dedicated team or a paid distribution for production
- Too heavy for a handful of servers
Top OpenStack alternatives
See all 2- 1
Proxmox VE66.5Far simpler to install and run, with a web UI for VMs and containers on small to mid-size clusters.
- 2
Apache CloudStack62.6A turnkey IaaS stack with a built-in UI and EC2-compatible API, easier to run with a small team.
Why people left OpenStack
In reviewers' own words, from reviews of the apps they moved to. These are their opinions, not ours.
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Reviews
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OpenStack: common questions
Is OpenStack free?
Yes. OpenStack is free, open-source software that you can host yourself.
Is OpenStack open source?
Yes. The source code is on GitHub at openstack/nova. You can also run it on your own server.
What platforms does OpenStack run on?
OpenStack is available for Self-hosted and Linux.
What are the best alternatives to OpenStack?
The highest-ranked OpenStack alternatives right now are Proxmox VE and Apache CloudStack. See the full ranked list for pricing, platforms and verified facts.