Best OpenStack Cloud Software

VEXXHOST provides open cloud and AI infrastructure spanning OpenStack, Ceph storage, Kubernetes platforms and GPU compute, hosted in its own facilities or deployed where the customer's data already lives.

Its differentiator is stated plainly and is worth taking seriously: VEXXHOST engineers contribute to the open source technologies behind the platform, not just the layer around them. That distinction separates a genuine operator from a reseller, because a provider that can fix a problem upstream is not waiting on someone else's release schedule when a customer hits a bug.

Placement flexibility runs through the portfolio. Every component deploys in VEXXHOST facilities, the customer's own data centre or another approved environment with a consistent operating model, so a workload can move without a re-architecture. Each offering is designed to be useful alone while working with the rest.

The stack covers OpenStack for private and public cloud with open APIs and complete operational control, Ceph for distributed block and object storage, Zuul for gated CI/CD testing changes together before they reach the main branch, GPU infrastructure for training and inference, managed AI inference endpoints for open, commercial or custom models, and AI advisory services. Running Kubernetes on OpenStack and inference on GPU infrastructure with one accountable engineering team is the stated proposition. Pricing is published, starting at 7.50 dollars per month.

Platform9 provides enterprise virtual machine and container management, positioned explicitly as a VMware exit route with existing hardware retained.

Reusing existing servers, storage, backup and disaster recovery tooling is the practical heart of the offer. A VMware migration that also demands new hardware and new operational tooling is not a migration but a rebuild, and the cost of that is what keeps organisations paying licence renewals they resent.

The published customer evidence is specific and covers the concerns that actually matter. Juniper Networks scaled its private cloud tenfold in three years without hiring extra staff, saving 50 percent against a do it yourself approach and VM licensing fees. EBSCO has run Platform9 in production since 2017, scaling fourfold. Yext provisioned across all environments in 20 minutes, a tenfold improvement on their best manual time. A Fortune 500 enterprise is migrating 40,000 virtual machines across 3,000 hypervisors at 200 VMs per day and 35 dollars per VM migration.

That last figure is the most useful number in the category, because migration cost per VM is exactly what an organisation needs to model a VMware exit and almost nobody publishes it. The Cloud Solution Provider Program serves providers losing their route to market after the VCSP wind-down, at a 1,000 dollar per month platform fee with unlimited cores for 90 days and free migration tooling. Compatibility spans Dell EMC, NetApp, Pure Storage and HPE.

Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes runs OpenStack services in containers on Kubernetes, managing virtualised and container infrastructure from a single platform.

Mirantis is unusually direct about who it is competing with, naming out of control VMware or public cloud costs as the reason to consider a private cloud and describing the product as a truly open, future proof VMware alternative that puts you back in control. It publishes side by side comparisons against both VMware and AWS EC2, which is more useful to an evaluator than generic positioning.

Containerising OpenStack services is the technical foundation, giving more resilient and scalable infrastructure because the control plane gains Kubernetes self healing and autoscaling behaviour. If a control plane component fails, the platform recovers it rather than requiring an operator.

Practical operations get real attention. Clusters deploy to on premises or hosted bare metal in a few clicks, a cluster update GUI lets operators plan, execute and troubleshoot updates with minimal risk of error, and dashboards and analytics built on Mirantis's own remote operations experience provide observability. Updates are where private clouds usually come apart, so making them a guided process rather than a manual procedure addresses the right problem. The extensible open source base avoids vendor lock in, and white glove managed services are available so internal teams can focus elsewhere. Pricing is not published; a free trial is offered.

Rackspace OpenStack Private Cloud delivers OpenStack as a managed service, which for most organisations is the only realistic way to run it.

Rackspace's position here is unusual: it co-founded the OpenStack project itself, and the operational knowledge that follows from having built and run the technology from its first release is not something a later entrant can assemble. For a platform whose reputation for difficulty is entirely about operations rather than capability, that history is the relevant credential.

The managed model addresses the actual barrier to adoption. OpenStack gives an organisation control over its infrastructure, its costs and where its data sits, but the price is running a complex distributed system with a team that knows how. Handing day to day operations to the vendor keeps the control while removing the staffing requirement, which is why the managed route dominates enterprise OpenStack.

Rackspace positions the offering within a wider portfolio spanning edge to core to cloud, operating the infrastructure, data layer and software integration to deliver predictable cost, reliability, security and compliance for regulated and mission critical environments. Forward Deployed Engineering embeds engineers in the customer's own environment, accountable from use case through to outcome, alongside professional and managed services for modernisation and ongoing operations. Pricing is not published.

OpenMetal is an automated bare metal and on demand private cloud provider, with a stated mission of cost effective private infrastructure that outperforms traditional public cloud.

Fixed pricing is its central commercial argument, with transparent monthly rates and no metered hours. That addresses the specific complaint driving cloud repatriation: not that public cloud is expensive in the abstract, but that the bill is unpredictable, and a workload whose cost varies with usage cannot be budgeted for a year ahead.

The published customer results are unusually consistent on that point. WordPress hosting platform Convesio cut infrastructure costs by over 50 percent while gaining complete control and eliminating hyperscaler unpredictability, and an AI powered customer support provider achieved 50 percent savings migrating DevOps and AI workloads off the mega public clouds. Two independent halvings suggest the gap is structural rather than a negotiated discount.

The range of workloads is broad, covering virtualisation, big data, blockchain and more. A cybersecurity firm deployed high powered ClickHouse infrastructure for real time analytics on massive datasets, African cloud provider CloudVantage built an entire public cloud business on OpenMetal's hosted private cloud, and the OpenStack Zuul project team runs its continuous integration and gating systems on dedicated resources. GPU servers and clusters serve AI training, inference and HPC on the same transparent monthly basis. Rates come from a deployment calculator.

Kolla Ansible deploys and operates OpenStack clouds using production ready containers, with the Kolla project's stated mission being to provide both those containers and the tooling to run them.

Its design philosophy is deliberately stated and unusually honest: highly opinionated out of the box, but allowing complete customisation. That combination is what makes it useful across experience levels. An operator with minimal OpenStack experience can deploy a working cloud quickly by accepting the defaults, then modify the configuration to exact requirements as understanding grows.

Getting that balance right is harder than it sounds and is where most deployment tools fail in one direction or the other. Tools that expose every option overwhelm a newcomer before anything runs, while tools that hide everything become useless the moment a real requirement falls outside the assumptions.

Containerising OpenStack services is the technical foundation, giving consistent, repeatable deployments and cleaner upgrades than package based installation, where a partial upgrade can leave a control plane in a state nobody intended. Container images are built through the separate Kolla image project, documented independently. The documentation is continuously updated against the development branch, with previous releases accessible by appending the OpenStack release name to the URL. It is a free and open source OpenStack project with community support.

OpenStack is a set of software components providing common services for cloud infrastructure, and beyond standard infrastructure as a service it adds orchestration, fault management and service management to keep user applications highly available.

Its scale is documented through named deployments rather than asserted, and the examples are unusually concrete. Walmart runs its e-commerce on an OpenStack cloud with more than 170,000 cores across over 30 regions, sized for peaks such as Black Friday. China Mobile, serving more than 800 million subscribers across 3 million base stations, is building the largest network functions virtualisation network on OpenStack with over 50,000 servers. Blizzard Entertainment uses OpenStack autoscaling to run games including Overwatch.

Those three cases matter because they are different problems. Retail e-commerce needs elastic capacity for predictable spikes, telecoms needs carrier grade reliability across distributed infrastructure, and games need autoscaling against unpredictable player demand. In total OpenStack is trusted to manage more than 40 million cores across dozens of industries.

The project is supported by a substantial vendor ecosystem. Ericsson's Cloud Execution Environment is a telecom grade virtual infrastructure manager based on OpenStack and OPNFV, deployed with more than 100 operators worldwide, and Red Hat contributes extensively across OpenStack and ancillary projects alongside support, training and consulting. The software itself is open source with no licence fee; cost comes from the distribution, support subscription or managed service an organisation chooses.

Canonical OpenStack turns a data centre into a professional cloud environment while keeping the infrastructure under the organisation's own control, and Canonical publishes its track record plainly: more than ten years on the market and over 500 clouds in production.

The figure that stands out is the third one. A Canonical OpenStack cloud can be spun up in a lab in around 30 minutes, which addresses the single biggest practical objection to OpenStack. Its reputation for difficulty comes largely from initial deployment, and a team that cannot get a working cloud running in an afternoon will never reach the point of evaluating whether it suits them.

The positioning is around cloud based operations without surrendering the benefits of owning the infrastructure, which is the core argument for private cloud generally: elastic self service provisioning for developers, with data residency, cost predictability and hardware control retained.

Canonical's wider portfolio surrounds the product with Ubuntu as the operating system, managed IT services for fully managed open source, open source security through a trusted software supply chain, and automation for deployment, management and scaling. Named industries include automotive, financial services, public sector, education, industrial and telco. Published case studies include SBI BITS placing business continuity at the heart of its OpenStack migration and Canonical deploying infrastructure for the European Space Agency's mission operations. Pricing is not published for OpenStack itself.