How Open Source Communities Are Impacting Cloud Computing
March 23, 2012
Cloud computing technology owes a lot to the various open source projects that continue to propel the technology forward, along with helping to create a greater awareness — both within and outside the IT industry — for cloud capabilities.
OpenStack, in particular, has been one of the greatest contributors to cloud computing. Since Rackspace and NASA launched the open source cloud project two years ago, the community of developers and cloud computing technologists have continued to improve on the open standard cloud computing platform for both public and private clouds…
The community’s end goal is to deliver solutions for all types of clouds by being easy to implement, massively scalable, and feature rich.
“The ‘Open Source Community’ at large is ill defined, partially because open source is a spectrum of approaches to releasing code and managing projects,” said Andrew Clay Shafer, a long-time contributor to OpenStack and newest member of Rackspace’s Cloud Builders team. “Open Source projects potentially have communities with strong affinity, but the idea that open source communities spontaneously form to write code for a project is provably untrue.”
Despite these achievements by the cloud computing open source community at large, not every one is in favor of these projects. One of the main criticisms about cloud open source projects is that their being controlled by a foundation makes it increasingly difficult for a foundation to satisfy both the project’s needs and each vendor member’s monetization goals.
Shafer, however, maintains that there are a lot of monetary opportunities for contributors of cloud open source projects by working with larger cloud enterprises, such as Amazon.
“Like many open source projects, which depend on a core of engineers creating and then publicly releasing lots of complex software for free, there are a range of opinions about how to interact with the profit-making giants,” said Shafer. “Of all the versions, perhaps the most successful, as well as the friendliest to Amazon, is Eucalyptus, which easily shares data and computing chores with A.W.S.”
Earlier this week, Amazon officially announced its partnership with Eucalyptus to help customers move data between their private clouds and Amazon Web Services.
But the more significant take away here is that Amazon is finally addressing the demand for private clouds, which goes to show how much of an impact cloud open source projects can have on the cloud computing industry as a whole.
There are many ways that individuals and companies can contribute to cloud open source projects, however, Shafer believes that it is up to current community members to encourage these contributions.
“While there is an opportunity to encourage contributions, there is also an opportunity for those in the community to lower the barrier to entry by improving the documentation and scaffolding required to actually do so,” said Shafer. “A lot has been done already, but we can always do better. When you first come to a project, you have the best perspective to help with that, because you just went through it. I also think it’s worth pointing out that installing the software, using it and providing feedback is contributing. Opening bugs is contributing.”
The cloud computing industry will only continue to flourish with more and more individuals and companies participating in these open source projects, and ultimately, drive innovation and adoption.
Shafer cites Fog, Jclouds, and libcloud as “great projects to interface with different clouds, depending on the language (Ruby, Java, Python).” He also highlights CloudStack, Open Mebula and Ganeti as other interesting infrastructure projects, along with cloud management projects like Puppet and Chef.
“Cloud changes how you need to think about monitoring and management,” said Shafer, “I expect a long list of next generation monitoring and log analysis project to emerge in the next year or so.”