The Cloud today seems a bit like Dawson City in 1896 when the Klondike Gold Rush was about to get underway. Everybody is talking about the Cloud, and many want a piece of the action. The Open Source world has been abuzz with OpenStack in particular, with some going so far as to call it “the new Linux”.
Unfortunately, Cloud has been saddled up with some serious marketing-babble baggage, and OpenStack is hard to immediately relate to. Even the technically savvy computer user could be forgiven for wondering, “what is everybody talking about!?!” This article will help you understand the relationship between your Linux distribution and an OpenStack Cloud.