Cloud technologies
Puppet: This solution seems to appeal mostly to operations teams with little to no development background. It is highly mature, but has trouble scaling past about 1000 configured machines when using a Puppet Master (a state server to track your infrastructure). While Puppet can be extended using the Ruby language, it is not terribly easy to do so. Puppet is difficult to pick up.
Chef: This solution resonates best with teams that, while not developers, are familiar with unit and integration testing, use of source control and other developer tooling. Chef is also highly mature and works at massive scale due to its adoption by Facebook which also has contributed. Chef was designed from the ground up to be readily extensible using the Ruby language. So, while it is DSL driven, extending the DSL is a simple matter that does not require one to fork the Chef software itself. Chef is very difficult to learn, though the exceptionally verbose output of a convergence run eases the identification and rectification of problems.
Ansible: This solution is by far the simplest of systems and appeals greatly to front line developers who often moonlight as their companies operations folks. It is written in Python, so has a certain attraction to the Python community. If you are considering configuration management for the first time ever and need an easy win, Ansible is good place to start.
Docker as a way to package code into consistent units of work. These units of work can then be deployed to testing, QA and production environments with far greater ease.
Vagrant is a way to use Oracle's Virtual Box or VMWare Fusion on a developer workstation for the purpose of creating disposable and shareable development environments.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenkins_%28software%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagrant_%28software%29
configuration management tool
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chef_%28software%29
orchestration management tool
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juju_%28software%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puppet_%28software%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_%28software%29
VM Managedment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docker_%28software%29
Virtualization:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_virtualization
QEMU
Linux kernel KVM
Paralellis
XEN (Amazon and others)
Virtual Box
VM Ware
Microsoft Hyper-V
Libvirt
z/VM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Virtualization_software
IaaS
Typically a platform virtualization environment – as a service, along with raw (block) storage and networking. Rather than purchasing servers, software, data-center space or network equipment, clients instead buy those resources as a fully outsourced service. Suppliers typically bill such services on a utility computing basis; the amount of resources consumed (and therefore the cost) will typically reflect the level of activity.
Bluemix
BlueMix is a PaaS - developing and hosting of new applications in the cloud - websphere
As most industry analysts agree, the majority (typically 80 percent or more) of customer IT budgets are consumed by operating, maintaining, and managing existing systems and workloads.
Development platform ecosystems managed by Microsoft, Oracle, Progress, and salesforce.com will feel the impact of BlueMix with its composable development environment, API catalog, mobility support, Cloud integration, DevOps capability, and Cloud workload management. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Windows Azure and Cloud Hosters will be challenged by the range of services and support capabilities IBM is bringing on SoftLayer and in the Cloud. And, clearly, there is more to come on SoftLayer. It would appear the blue elephant has just begun to dance.
BlueMix will run in SoftLayer on top of the open source platform, Cloud Foundry, originally sponsored as a project by VMware. Cloud Foundry became the charge of the Pivotal subsidiary, as it was spun out of VMware and EMC. Now its organizers say they are moving the PaaS project out into its own foundation and governing board. The Apache Software Foundation, OpenStack, and other key open source code projects have followed a similar route to gain the broadest possible backing.
