Cloud computing is one of the buzz words of today. Today there are a lot of cloud operators in the market like Amazon, IBM, Google Cloud Platform and other associate technologies of each company like Amazon has EC2, ECS, CloudWatch, Lamda server and much more.
Open stack is a free and open source platform for cloud computing. Open stack is an infrasturcture providing company where virtual servers, containers, bare metal are made available to customers. It controls controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, all managed and provisioned through APIs with common authentication mechanisms.
If you are looking for a neutral cloud provider, Open stack may be the best option because all their software is Open source and have lot of associated members like OpenSuse, Oracle, RedHat, IBM, HP etc. Open stack is now being used by a lot of reliable users like BBC, GoDady, CERN, BMW etc.
OpenStack is a cloud operating system that controls storage and networking resouce through datacentre, by giving peace of mind for users who provisions this through a WEB user interface.
While Amazon EC2 is service in Amazon web service which offers virtual servers on rent. With just servers in Amazon EC2 you can rent computers only. Yet for deployment of services and storages you need to use other technologies in Amazon Tech stack.
This is where the main difference between amazon EC2 and Open stack, while Open stack is a big computing provider with it’s storage provided(Swift), networking, security(Keystone), Orchestration(Heat) and even more. While EC2 is just a small part of entire computing stack of Amazon Web services.
Nova is the OpenStack project that provides a way to provision compute instances (similar to AWS EC2). Nova supports creating virtual machines, baremetal servers (through the use of ironic), and has limited support for system containers. It can be used with any associated . Currently amazon has a lot more fraction of users that Open stack environment. Yet situation is going to change in a few years with lot more Cloud Operators.