Cloud is perhaps one of the most talked about an over-used buzzword in IT today – leading to a lot of confusion and dilution of the term. This talk will give a brief overview of the types of cloud deployment models (public, private, and hybrid) and a general understanding of generic cloud service offerings (Saas, Paas, and IaaS). The bulk of the conversation will focus on the open source software and standards to adhere to for building cloud computing environments and the complementary open source management tools that can be combined to automate the management of them. The discussion will appeal to anyone who has a good grasp of traditional data center infrastructure but is struggling with the benefits and migration path to a cloud computing environment. Systems administrators and IT generalists will leave the discussion with a general overview of the options for building and managing