Building a cloud ecosystem with open source software

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Michelle Boisvert.

Mention the words "open source" to IT pros interested in adopting cloud computing, and their ears likely will perk up. Open source software offers a solution to the vendor lock-in concerns many enterprises have with committing to a cloud platform. And cloud platforms like the OpenStack Foundation, which fosters ‘coopitition’ among seeming competitors in the hot cloud computing market, give companies the option to build interoperable open source clouds. But what options do enterprises have when seeking open source PaaS?

SearchCloudComputing spoke with Cédric Thomas, chief executive officer of OW2, a Paris-based, independent community focused on creating a code base of open source software for cloud computing. Similar to Apache and the OpenStack Foundation, OW2 concentrates on infrastructure software as well as the tools to develop, deploy and manage applications for approximately 100 projects over a 60-member community that’s 22,000 developers strong…

How does OW2 differ from Apache, OpenStack and other open source cloud platforms?

Cédric Thomas: We were founded out of Europe; our members are mainly corporations, organizations and universities rather than individuals, which is the case for Apache. Other than that, we don’t differentiate in terms of technology.

We recently had meetings with OpenStack and realized there was no competition at all between OW2 and OpenStack, because everything OW2 does is actually a layer above that. OpenStack concentrates on the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) layer with the compute, network and storage functionalities. Everything OW2 does targets the Platform as a Service (PaaS) layer — the applications or the application platforms for the cloud. All our cloud projects now have OpenStack as a reference for the development platform…

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