CHICAGO — At CloudOpen, a Linux Foundation tradeshow held in conjunction with LinuxCon, the Foundation announced that an online survey of open-source cloud professionals found OpenStack to be the most popular overall project.

That wasn't surprising. Although OpenStack is only four years old , the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud project is very popular with support from such industry giants HP, Red Hat, and VMware . What was somewhat surprising was that number two was Docker, the just-over-a-year old container technology .

It's no news that Docker is hotter than hot , but to go from nowhere to the second most popular project in 12 months? That's amazing and speaks to its rockstar rise in popularity.

Behind those two, you'll find KVM, the x86 virtualization technology that's recently been ported to Power ; CloudStack , one of the older open-source IaaS cloud projects; and Ceph, the open-source, software-defined storage stack.

Beyond the top five list, the Foundation and its media partner The New Stack drilled into the following categories: Hypervisor/Container, IaaS, Platform as a Service (PaaS), Configuration and Management Tools, and Storage.

In hypervisors, KVM, which is built into Linux, was the top virtualization program with 48 percent. After that came Docker, which while not "virtualization" software per se, has turned containers into today's hot virtualization-like technology. After that Xen took the third spot. Xen's placement struck me as a little odd since Xen is not only one of the oldest open-source virtualization programs and, because it forms the foundation for the Amazon cloud, is easily the most used hypervisor in the world.

In IaaS, once you're done with OpenStack and CloudStack, OpenNebula and Eucalyptus take up the next two spots. The other IaaS projects are lost in the noise.

PaaS is another area with a clear leader. Here it's Red Hat's OpenShift with 54 percent of the vote. After that comes CloudFoundry with 36 percent. Past the big two, no other PaaS platform really has a significant presence.

It's really the same story in storage. Ceph leads the category with 49.6 percent of the vote. After that Gluster comes in second with 20 percent and OpenStack's Swift had 17 percent.

When it comes to DevOps tools, it's a dogfight. Sure Puppet is number one with 23 percent, but it's followed closedly by Ansible with 18 percent; then SaltStack with 13.3 percent; JuJu with 10.7 percent; and finally Chef with 10.4 percent. I think DevOps is still wide open and no one has established themselves as the clear alpha dog yet.

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