Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers and enterprises alike are fueling the Open Source community as they realise their growth is inextricably linked to it. The partnership with Open Source largely arises from the obvious reduction in costs of acquisition and licensing when compared to parallel proprietary solutions. To understand this on a scaleable level we need to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Interoperability based on Open Standards delivers far more as you would or can expect.
Open source is quite often seen as the great enabler in cloud computing -- a world in which messages and streams bring you the content and capabilities you need specifically adapted to your context. Cloud computing has successfully reached the ‘peak of inflated expectations’ in Gartner’s 2010 hype cycle. Massive cloud environments built on open source ecosystems cradled by Yahoo!, Google and Amazon have been responsible for the increased popularity and awareness of open source infrastructure based cloud computing.
Here is a look at some of the most popular tools that leverage the power of open source:
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud: the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provides infrastructure and computing capabilities for its subscribers. EC2 is typically accessed through a web interface that allows a user to configure, monitor his computing resources and allocate or deallocate resources dynamically. EC2 is built to fully support open source and is based on Amazon's Xen-enabled Linux kernel and any operating system that can run on top of Xen is supported.
- Google App Engine: Google's App Engine provides a platform for open source developers to build web applications based on Python through a SDK. App Engine restricts applications to a secure sandbox with limited access to the underlying operating system. App Engine can automatically ramp up compute resources within predefined quotas to handle spikes in traffic. Each App Engine user account can run up to three applications with 500MB of persistent storage and enough CPU horsepower and network bandwidth to support about five million page views a month.
There has however been a general concern that the cloud computing industry will use open source as leverage for a new generation of proprietary platforms-as-a-service (PaaS), similar to how the established Web 2.0 services in the consumer space used open source platforms to capture and create lock-in around data. Others have argued that software deployed to the cloud obsoletes open source licenses, undermining the point of the software itself, with some even going so far as to call the loophole that permits this “a cancer.”
But if a cloud provider really intends to make a mark in this new competitive area then he would not want to invest in licensed proprietary software for all his 25000 servers. Neither would he be able to afford it. This is where open source software comes in and how the cloud movement and open source initiatives will help each other grow.
It is true, however, these mega conglomerates can be blamed for not creating truly open clouds. But the open source community has a keen eye for filling gaps like these and so we have completely open source cloud offerings such as Chef, Eucalyptus and the Swarm.
- Chef: although this offering is only one year old, Chef is aggressively developing their project as can be seen by the frequency of their code check-ins. It is especially popular among cloud deployments. The way Chef works is you write source code to describe how you want each part of your infrastructure to be built and apply those descriptions to your servers. The result is a fully automated infrastructure. Chef is professionally supported and sponsored by opscode.
- Eucalyptus: Eucalyptus, aka Elastic Utility Computing Architecture Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems, is an open-source software infrastructure for implementing “cloud computing” on clusters. The current interface to Eucalyptus is compatible with Amazon’s EC2, S3, and EBS interfaces, but the infrastructure is designed to support multiple client-side interfaces. Eucalyptus is implemented using commonly available Linux tools and basic Web-service technologies making it easy to install and maintain.
What Chef and Eucalyptus lack is the infrastructure and the ability to provide its users with services like free e-mail and extensive word processing. They also lack the necessities required to compete on the same level with the likes of Amazon and Google. Then again, open source has a tendency to leverage its main weakness and twist it around to make it its main strength. This brings us to Swarm.
- Swarm: the fundamental concept behind Swarm is the ability to move the computation, not the data. Simply described it involves downloading and running some free code on your computer by which you can contribute processing power and disc space that collectively creates a global, distributed cloud computing system. Swarm has much progress to make before it is viewed as a viable solution. It is an exciting concept none the less.
The partnership between open source and cloud computing has even made its way to the US White House. At the urging of Federal CIO Vivek Kundra, US government agencies are exploring the feasibility of cloud computing as a fast, flexible way of procuring server capacity and other IT resources. We have yet to see the feds come out with a position on open source clouds, but the two trends -- open source and cloud computing -- seem destined to intersect in government IT. Already, one of the earliest examples of a government cloud, NASA's still-in-alpha Nebula, is comprised largely of open source components.
Revenues of Indian IT providers depend on application development and maintenance. This puts them in a perfect position to offer cloud-based services to their customers. Indian IT firms Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Infosys Technologies now offer several platform-based- business process outsourcing (BPO) services.
Wipro, the country's third largest IT exporter, is also betting big on cloud computing. Its hosted intelligent document management solution is a cloud-based offering for businesses who want to move towards a paperless office. It provides scanning, indexing, managing and archiving of electronic documents on a SaaS-based scalable model. Wipro's hosted electronic data interchange is also cloud-based with no upfront licensing and upgrade fees.
All this places further emphasis on the urgent need for solutions that make it easy for companies to move between various cloud platforms in a distributed environment. This is a great opportunity for companies that can provide migration services between cloud providers and fill in the technology gaps in the areas of cloud enablement, management, monitoring and security. 2010 will see an array of new open source startups powered by pilot projects. What will also be interesting to watch is the interest large corporations will show in acquiring such startups.