Picking an OpenStack distribution

OpenStack is developed like most open source software projects. The code is available at http://openstack.org and can be downloaded in the package format from http://tarballs.openstack.org. As of the Liberty release of OpenStack, there were over 350 individual projects available for download. That's a huge number of source repositories for an engineering team to sort through and manage. Hence the development of the OpenStack distributions. Most of the OpenStack distributions are put together by the same groups that put together Linux distributions. For example, the three major distributions available are part of the Ubuntu, openSUSE, and CentOS Linux distributions. Each of these distributions maintain installation guides, available at http://docs.openstack.org. There are also distributions available from companies such as HP, Mirantis, and Red Hat which are part of commercial support agreements. In addition to these options, there are also companies such...