The cloud is emerging as one of the most important new technologies for fueling innovation and growth in the enterprise. But the rapid pace of change and abundance of choice at every layer of the stack make it hard to keep up with the latest and greatest projects. Finding the right projects to build, provision and maintain a completely open source cloud can be even more challenging.

To help customers make sense of the open cloud landscape, The Linux Foundation last week released a new white paper that profiles 18 open source projects that are the building blocks of the open cloud. The paper doesn’t offer a comprehensive list of open source cloud projects, but instead focuses on those most relevant to the open cloud, that are also relatively mature and visible to the community but aren’t already mainstays of commercial use.

The projects profiled fall into five general categories: Hypervisors & Containers; Iaas; PaaS; Provisioning & Management; and Storage. And all are released under an open source license that guarantees full access to their codebase.

“The open cloud is one in which every component, from the software to the APIs used by application developers, is open to vendors, developers and customers alike,” according to the paper.

You’ll find a slideshow of the 18 projects, along with brief descriptions, linked below. For more information on a project’s history, contributors, key users, lines of code and more, download the full white paper.