Submitted articles
Open Source and Cloud Computing - A One-sided Love Affair?
Column inches. It’s not just how many a subject has, but where it has it. And these days, very few subjects are garnering as many column inches, in as many different IT publications, for as many different IT users, as ‘The Cloud’. (Queue the Imperial March from Star Wars for those inclined).
But what is ‘The Cloud’, really? I’m always very dubious of technical answers when they clearly deviate from one vendor to the next. Is it about virtual machines and all that para-virtualised[1] goodness. No, not really. How about load balancing, clustering, pay-as-you-go? Close, but no banana.
Cloud is all and none of those things. Cloud is an economical inevitability.
Unless you’re running a business where cash and flexibility are not concerns (and if so, just point me to the contract and I’ll sign on the dotted line right now) then Cloud is going to become important to you. The big boys are betting on this, and they are rapidly turning themselves into the Cloud Computing utility services of the future[2].
Cloud is about doing more with less, about treating IT as a flexible commodity that should be squeezed to get every bit of value out of its dollar worth, and not a glossy never-to-be-questioned capital expense commercial advantage. If you’re a small business, this means Cloud is likely going to mean paying for the virtual IT infrastructure you need, only when you need it, from a public cloud on the Internet. If you’re an existing player with a large investment in data centres, it’s likely to mean applying Virtualisation to build a private cloud so that you can make more of your existing investment, always keeping an eye to scaling to a more economically efficient public cloud, sometimes called a hybrid cloud, when the timing is right. Either way, IT is a commodity and to compete the focus turns to the applications, or perhaps more aptly: services, that you can deliver as quickly as possible to meet the existing demands of your customers as well as hooking as many new customers as possible.
Technically Cloud is anything that makes this situation possible. Don’t get me wrong, the Internet is crucial as a standard distribution mechanism and Virtualisation makes flexible IT a reality. And plenty of books will focus on these and other technologies being the answer to ”What is the Cloud?”. But actually it’s about treating IT as the commodity that it inevitably is becoming. And it’s about figuring out how to use that commodity to make the most out of the future software market. A market defined by the services that your business can build on top of the IT supplied as a utility. And in that market anyone with a credit card big enough, and the size is getting smaller every day, can be smart enough to compete with the big boys.
It’s going to be a fun time to be in software.
What does the Cloud mean for Open Source?
At first glance, this question seems silly. I mean, what could a new economical model for building and delivering IT services mean for the debate over whether to open up your source code or not?
Actually, if the current success stories in the cloud are anything to go by, the implications for open source could be very important. Even terminal, in time. You see, there are very few open source Cloud success stories. Actually, scratch that, I can’t think of even one!
Take Google Search, the mother of all software as a service success stories. I don’t think any sane developer or business targeting the Cloud in order to build their next world-beating service would not be aware of the phenomenal success of that particular elephant-in-the-server-room.
But is Google Search open source? Is it heck! Bits and pieces might be, but the engine is guarded like the proverbial squirrels nuts, and with good reason (although it’s debatable whether even the source code for Google being delivered by a hoard of Mountain View Oompa Loompas to the very doorstep of Big Steve Balmer could do anything for Bing’s fortunes. If you’re no good with a go kart, there’s no point trying to drive an F1 car).
Yes, the Xen Virtualisation platform is a significant example of open source, but it’s a Virtualisation system. It’s about virtual machines, one common technical underpinning of Cloud Computing. It’s not ‘infrastructure as a service’, such as Amazon’s excellent Web Services offerings[3]. Amazon took Xen, added the extra necessities needed to turn infrastructure into an on-demand, pay-as-you-go Cloud service. In this example, Amazon Web Services is the Cloud success story, not Xen.
And that’s the rub. Right now, open source is massive in the provision of tools in order to build Cloud services. People get into Open Source for credibility, because a problem interests them, because no-one else has done that thing they need/want in their day jobs, and essentially to scratch an itch. But how does that model fit with cloud services? Where are the Open Source cloud services? Where is the open source Facebook that’s making huge amounts of money and provides source code we can read, learn from, gain credibility from and perhaps even emulate? What itch is being scratched exactly, and does it attract open source developers? So far, no.
The truth is there are no open source Facebooks. There are not even any open source search engines of any note that I’m aware of. I can’t think of a single Cloud Service Provider who is brave enough to risk opening up their code to the open source community, and I can understand why they’re wary.
In this new world of commodity IT in the Cloud, what’s to stop someone not grabbing your code and building a better Facebook? Brand only goes so far and let’s not forget that the competitive edge in the new post-IT-as-a-commodity Cloud market is all about providing innovative and compelling services, and when looked at this way the source code is once again becoming the secret source[sic] in the business equation. With an emphasis on the ‘secret’. Open Source is, from this perspective, on the back foot and proprietary services, with the magic of the code necessary to provide that service in the cloud, are the success stories so far.
But what about the recent SpringSource acquisition by VMWare, maybe there’s comfort in that? ”$325 squillion dollars is not a success story?!” I hear you cry. Well, of course it is. And one richly deserved by some truly professional, all-round-nice-people and new-Ferrari-buying developers. But is it a Cloud success story? Unfortunately, it’s a little early to make that call.
Yes, Spring is an open source framework. Cloud Foundry[4] is a fantastic example of a Platform as a Service that helps you take your Spring applications (and Grails applications[5]) to the Cloud. But will VMWare/SpringSource roll out an open source Cloud Computing platform for running Spring applications? Will we see the source code for CloudFoundry available on GitHub to all and sundry anytime soon? Unlikely I’d say. I’d love to be wrong. The framework in this case is absolutely open, and no one could question SpringSource’s commitment there. However Cloud Foundry is not, and is unlikely to be made so. There’s really no reason for that to be compelling to SpringSource’s business.
So this all adds up to slightly depressing reading. It seems from the evidence in the marketplace that there’s very little reason to build a Cloud success story, be that a Platform/Infrastructure/Application or whatever as a Service, and to then open source that implementation. I’ve even heard ardent open source professionals arguing that they would be ‘giving away the farm’ to open source the services they’re building, perhaps ironically, on open source technologies.
And they’re doing nothing wrong. Open source has consistently become a hall mark for quality and producing some of the greatest examples of great software (and if there’s an example where it’s not, you can see the source and avoid the thing like the plague). I don’t think open source is dead, not for a second, but I am worried about it’s place in the new world order of Cloud services. Open Source has done a wonderful job of bringing computing into its commodity status, but is it then in a good position to be relevant in that new world that it helped to create? What place does open source have, other than a technical underpinning, when it comes to building and exposing profitable services in the Cloud? Will open source be relegated to ‘plumbing’? Will this mean an end to the strong innovation that we’ve gotten used to in the open source community?
That’s a lot of questions, and I’m aware I’ve almost asked the same thing a few times in different ways. But indulge me, this is a big question. I’m a passionate contributor to open source, and I want to continue to be that way in the future. Open Source is an attractive place for innovation, and we stand to lose that edge if we’re not very careful. The Cloud is bringing some old pressures back to the fore, and open source feels under threat once again.
So the question is, is that a bad thing in this new, rich market of Cloud services? Will we be concerned that the code behind those services is closed off. Will we care?
References
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ParaVirtualisation
[2] http://bit.ly/2gq2jN
[3] http://aws.amazon.com/
[4] http://www.cloudfoundry.com
[5] http://www.grails.org
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