Guest post by Pete Chadwick
Pete Chadwick is senior cloud solutions manager with SUSE, a unit of the Attachmate Group.
Agility, flexibility and customization. They’re the “big three” buzzwords companies cite to justify their investments in cloud computing. But while today’s leading cloud players have the best technological interests in mind, financial interests are prohibiting them from delivering an open environment for cloud computing.
Open source, particularly Linux, has based itself upon these three benefits since its inception. And after 20 years of Linux success, we’re at a historical inflection point when openness is not only accepted, it is demanded. First the operating system and then virtualized environments - where in each case, after an initial wave of proprietary options came an emergence – and then acceptance – of open source solutions. And now, history is repeating itself yet again with cloud computing, as projects like OpenStack, a community software project to build private and public clouds, have burst out this year with the backing of thousands of developers and technological minds. OpenStack now has the support of over 180 public and private organizations worldwide.
Open source was born in an effort to make technology more collaborative, affordable and available to all – and it comes with the mindset to advance beyond the limitations of proprietary technology. Here’s how open source is picking up where the status quo is falling short:
- Choice
Again, one of the promises of cloud is that the solution can be scaled up and down according to need; plugged in and used rapidly and easily. But you can’t have true flexibility if you’re tied into a single solution. Look at virtualization, for instance. Much has been made about the “hypervisor wars” between large, household name vendors. This war has shifted to the cloud, with vendors building their cloud solutions on top of their own hypervisors.
The reality is, very few actual companies are using one type of hypervisor. And if you have a variety of different technology companies in your IT environment, then you’ll need several cloud solutions that are somehow expected to work together. This is not flexibility, and it is contradictory to one of the goals of an open cloud movement -- to ensure the entire infrastructure works together.
On the open source side, the community is investing significant resources into integration and compatibility, so every piece of IT infrastructure works in the cloud harmoniously. This allows organizations to make the best existing usage of their investments.
- Accountability
Within IT, conventional wisdom has always been that open source is a riskier investment than a large, proprietary alternative. Compound those historical concerns with cloud security angst and you have a security crisis before you’ve even installed anything.
But think of it this way: If you’re running a proprietary stack, you’re limited to the service providers that run on that single brand of infrastructure. If you need to mix and match, will your proprietary vendor be open to having the solution integrate with everything else? If you don’t have full support, then you’re opening up risks when the pieces don’t work together.
With an open solution, it’s easy to identify where the security holes are –with a proprietary system, it’s impossible. Because you have numerous security specialists and developers with varied expertise in an open source community looking at the code, you have a higher chance of uncovering breaches sooner. No single vendor is able to cover up the issue and the community will quickly deliver a fix. If you have a proprietary system and there is a bug in the code, there is exactly one vendor that can solve the problem. But if your open source provider isn’t delivering, you can turn to dozens of others that can.
- Unity
There’s another lesson history has taught us about open source providers: They’re very difficult to out-innovate, especially when key stakeholders put their development weight behind a particular project. Linux was able to overcome UNIX in the server space; now it has 18 percent of all server revenues, according to IDC. In the mobile space, Android now enjoys a healthy 50.9 percent market share, up from 30 percent at the end of 2010. Over 450 developers, which is only a fraction of the entire community, participated in the most recent OpenStack design summit and over 500 contributed code to the latest release. This community is far larger than any single proprietary solution. The track record of innovation is set up for success.
Linux, used by thousands of businesses and millions of consumers across the world, celebrated its 20th anniversary last year. It did so with a footprint in the enterprise and mobile technologies that few would have forecasted. The next battleground for open source will be the cloud. With the ideals of the open source movement strongly in place, the cloud is an area where an empowered community can drive new innovation and technology advancements. Where proprietary vendors have done a good job of setting the table, look for a push from a community of thousands to bring cloud computing technologies to a new level.
