For Linux users, there's a new kind of computer on the market, and it's known as the cloud.
As with the PC sitting on your desk, the laptop in your backpack, and the virtual private server you rent from your favorite web hosting service, you have your choice in vendors for cloud computing. The brand names are different than the hardware brands you've known over the years, but the concept is the same.
To run Linux, you need a computer. To run Linux on the cloud, you need a cloud service provider. And just like the hardware and firmware that ships with your computer, there's a spectrum for how open source your computing stack can be.
As a user of open source, I prefer my computing stack to be as open as possible. After a careful survey of the cloud computing market, I've developed a three-tier view of cloud service providers. Using this system as your guide, you can make intelligent choices about what cloud provider you choose.
Open stack
A cloud that's fully open is a cloud built on open source technology from the ground up. So much cloud technology is open source, and has been from the beginning, that an open stack isn't all that difficult to accomplish, at least on the technical level. However, there are cloud providers reinventing the wheel in a proprietary way, which makes it easy to stumble into a cloud provider that's mixed a lot of closed source components in with the usual open source tooling.
If you're looking for a