Open source software stack in Cloud Computing
Sabtu, 16 Maret 2013
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Open source software stack in Cloud Computing
Discussing about role of Open Source Software and its trends in Cloud Computing
What is the role that Open Source is playing in cloud computing?
It depends on the type of cloud computing we are discussing.
SAAS - As long as the customer is getting the services, un-interrupted, with preferred performance, they don’t worry about the technology and servers behind.
Customer has more concerns on the PAAS and IAAS platform, as they do care about the development environment, application server stack, the frameworks, databases, the tools and language etc.
As large and medium enterprises move into cloud space, the ability to manage and provide heterogeneous environments which consist of multiple hardware platforms, operating systems and applications stack, at lower cost will become the critical success factor in migrating and consolidating onto the cloud, in the current highly competitive market.
One of the most important ways that the open-source movement is fuelling and accelerating the growth of cloud computing is found in the community-building component. The open-source community element has inspired technological and business model innovations across a spectrum of industries and professional cloud service providers.
The economic conditions are part of the reason for the use of open source in cloud computing, but flexibility, avoiding vendor lock-in, and access to the source code are other reasons for choosing open source stack, favourite for cloud infrastructure.
Open source has several key dimensions that contribute to cloud computing success:
1) Licenses that permit and encourage redistribution, modification.
2) Almost zero cost on the software stack
3) Introducing Open Stack standards for interoperability, and cloud mobility.
4) Fuelling and accelerating the growth of community building components in cloud space.
Open source’s low barriers to entry and abundance offer significant time-to-market advantages and make it an emerging and important key factor on deciding the development strategies for cloud service providers.
How the cloud service providers leveraging open source?
Both Open source and Proprietary clouds have its own role and advantages, however when we get into details, open source software has an important role in today’s cloud computing stacks with significant use of Linux, open source hypervisors KVM and Xen, open source data technologies such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Hadoop, NoSQL and memcached and open source languages such as Java, PHP, Python and Ruby on Rails etc.
Open source is a huge part of today’s cloud computing offerings from major providers like Amazon, Google, Rackspace, Terremark, VMware and many more. Open source drives technical innovation in the cloud, especially in the areas of virtualization, storing Big Data in NoSQL data stores, searching several Gigs of information quickly, and analysing tremendous volumes of data using business intelligence.
After deploying to a production environment, it's important to measure service level agreements for both your cloud providers and your applications; open source solutions already has upper hand on customizing managing and monitoring solutions on cloud infrastructure, yet another reason we expect open source to maintain its prominent place in the clouds.
While there will certainly be challenges, including the maturity, security aspects, evolution and learning from open source, we expect more open source code and commercial supporters in enterprise and service provider cloud markets for some time.
What are the advantages of using open source in the cloud?
Lower costs, superior security, flexibility and freedom from vendor lock-in, rapid pace of innovation, cloud mobility.
Other advantages are
- Customization based on immediate requirements- open source software can be readily adapted to meet specific customer needs. If customer has specific requirements urgently, they can employ any skilled software developer to do the changes on demand.
- Translation - Large closed source commercial software vendors are usually unwilling to translate their products into less widely spoken languages, as the market for them would be too small to guarantee a profit.
- Mitigation of vendor/product collapse: the source code is not 'owned' in the same way that proprietary source code is, it may be picked up and developed by anyone with an interest in a product's survival.
- Open source being the base would also considerably reduce the TCO of cloud deployments for service providers which would, in turn, pass on to the end user as better affordability.
- The ROI is going to be much better with open source than a pure proprietary approach, as it has better capex and opex. I am sure big enterprises cannot change completely to open source but they could tap into open source wherever possible and save big when coupled with the cloud economics.
To what extent are public Cloud service providers leveraging OSS?
Novell has been a pioneer in the adoption and propagation of open source, and with SUSE Linux, Novell continues to work closely with the Open Source Community to build the next generation of innovative software that would be required for physical, virtual and cloud environments, especially in the manageability and security spaces.
Amazon, Oracle, VMware and even Microsoft, are other major cloud providers in its use of and participation with the PHP community, MySQL community.
Citrix is another example, and it is evident the company believes openness in the cloud is a good thing based on its Citrix OpenCloud announcement and focus on ‘Open Cloud,’ (which also coincides with its acquisition of virtualization management vendor VMLogix).
IBM is another greatest backers of open source technology with IBM Blue cloud. It is based on an open-source project called Hadoop that manages computing resources across large clusters of computers. Hadoop includes an open-source version of MapReduce, the same software Google uses to efficiently distribute its computing chores across its servers around the world.
Is using OSS in cloud dissolving the cost barrier even further and encouraging SMB's to take the plunge?
From the perspective of India business, many SMBs use shared hosting, VPS and dedicated servers to host their applications, which is too restrictive for running many applications and offer less than optimal performance. VPS has limitations, as it cannot scale out easily and suffer from sub-optimal performance due to hoster’s greed. Dedicated servers also have a scale out problems and high cost issues.
India, I feel the larger adoptions would come from the fast-growing SMB market where they use standard applications which can be readily deployed by the various cloud service providers, thereby reducing costs and hardware footprint, and forming a plug-and-play model.
What are the impediments to the use of OSS in the cloud?
As per IDC survey result, the challenges and issues of cloud model are shown below:
Courtesy: International Data Corporation, USA.
Cloud computing is a new technology and especially Open Source Service providers are newbies in the market, and most of the challenges and issues mentioned above are valid for Open Source Stack also to certain extend.
Major impediments of Open Source Stack in cloud computing are:
- Unfamiliarity with open source solutions,
- Lack of technical skills,
- Lack of formal commercial vendor support,
- Lack of maturity in Open Source standardization, reduces cloud interoperability and mobility.
- Cost and complexity of managing OSS use, and the perceived risk of OSS as additional challenges
- More difficult to use, lack key functionality,
Most of these barriers can be traced to the lack of an enterprise-wide open source strategy and clear policies and procedures for managing its use. The good news is these barriers appear to be falling rapidly as major players realize the benefits of open source and take proactive steps to adopt strategies, policies and solutions for managing its use across the global enterprise.
Developers are high on the usage of OSS in cloud? Is it only a bubble or is there actual implementation taking place?
Bitnami, CollectD, Enomaly,OpenNebula, RabbitMQ, Chef, Eucalyptus, Open Nebula, Open QRM, puppet, Zenoss, Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, Cloud Stack are some of the key open source development activities supported by active development mailing lists, regular releases and a real active community behind them.
Ongoing social and community pressure on large cloud vendors such as Google to make their “fair share” of contributions to open source projects and communities.
LibCloud is another cloud development community, very active on developing open source client libraries for many popular cloud providers.
Backed by more than 50 organizations - including Rackspace, NASA, Dell, Cisco Systems, and Canonical – OpenStack, open source software for building clouds, is currently enjoying a huge level of interest among open source communities.
More blogs, community forums to know what the latest happenings are, listed below.
What are the key dimensions that are helping the cause of OSS?
There is a clear need for the standardization of current open source cloud platforms at least of terms of interface, negotiation and access through various communication interfaces. Understandably, this is a considerable task as many clouds use different abstraction levels; some are generic whereas others focus on a specific application domain, etc. Some initial steps have been taken into this direction with the setup of the Open Cloud Manifesto, an initiative supported by hundreds of companies in the same space.
Efforts can be seen in achieving cloud interoperability is the creation of the Management Task Force (DMTF). This task force has enlisted such vendors as HP, Microsoft, Citrix, Sun Microsystems, Cisco, EMC, Red Hat, IBM, Intel, Novell, Savvis, AMD, and VMware, to come up with a solution that they call the “Open Cloud Standards Incubator” to enable interoperability between private clouds within the enterprise and hosted or public cloud providers. The goal is to allow individual vendors to display interoperability between 2 clouds and record their approaches to ensure interoperability and cloud mobility.
Standards organization IEEE has decided to get involved in cloud computing, starting with two development projects related to cloud interoperability. According to IEEE, cloud computing is primed for explosive growth, but "without a flexible, common framework for interoperability, innovation could become stifled, leaving [users] with a siloed ecosystem.
As part of its cloud push, IEEE has started two working groups, P2301 Work Group will work on standardizing cloud portability and management, using a number of file formats and interfaces. While the P2302 Work Group will focus on cloud-to-cloud interoperability and federation.
Below are some of the consortium and standards committee formed on the interests to resolve immediate issues with Open Source Cloud Computing and to strengthen and promote OSS in Cloud Computing.
Enterprise Cloud Buyers Council - was formed to work on security, reliability and interoperability. Microsoft, Cisco and IBM are part of that group.
OVF - the first and only cloud-oriented standard that has been ratified, was approved in September 2010 after three years of processing by the DMTF, gives customers and vendors some platform independence. It helps facilitate mobility, but it does not provide all of the independence needed for cloud interoperability.
The Open Data Center Alliance was formed to sway IT vendors toward supporting a cloud computing world where openness is a priority.
The Open Cloud Consortium, which focuses on working with vendors and industry to make sure the cloud is open, including the use of its Open Cloud Testbed.
For more references: http://cloud-standards.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page
What are the trends pertaining to OSS in the cloud space?
Likely hood of Cloud usage in coming years, as per IDC, is listed below.
Cloud computing frameworks and platforms designed to support integration with cloud services, scalability in private and public clouds, and manage and store cloud data are growing rapidly and include well-known projects such as Hadoop, Eucalyptus, Hyperic, deltaCloud, Open Stack and OpenECP.
On IAAS, expect new entrants on the scene, particularly in the open source space that will increasingly complicate the IaaS market share dominance of AWS, Eucalyptus, Rackspace, GoGrid and Joyent.
The open source customers are now more focused on mainstream technology issues, including improved operational excellence around areas such as support, product management, feature functionality and return on investment.
Cloud storage gateways are going to be crucial in coming years and in a short term to help with cultural changes inside the organizations before they get more comfortable with the idea of cloud based storage.
One of the main use-case advantages of cloud computing is collaboration. In fact, many organizations have, for instance, adopted Google Docs solely as a collaboration tool, which I believe a little dangerous call, till more similar open source collaborations are matured.
The final trend is in the area of mobility. Open mobile platforms – Android is an example – are driving innovation and gaining market share quickly over other mobile operating systems connecting to cloud computing for mobile games, data storage and more. That trend will continue to drive the comfort level and adoption rates of open source in other categories as well.
Another interesting news is, Nebula, an open-source cloud computing platform that was developed to provide an easily quantifiable and improved alternative to building additional expensive data centers; attracted NASA scientists and researchers to share large, complex data sets with external partners and the public; gaining more public attention and watched closely by especially government organizations.
Is OSS being adopted in private cloud as well?
Major inhibitors regarding cloud adoption, in India, seem to be primarily the regulatory mandates like that of the RBI in the case of banks, and also concerns around security.
According to a survey that Novell commissioned, which covered 210 IT decision-makers across the world, 91% said that they are concerned about security issues around the public cloud area. Migration and consolidation of complex heterogeneous environments are also a critical challenge.
Government entities and enterprises are increasingly realizing the advantages such as effective communication, cost benefits, higher productivity, and lesser carbon footprints by leveraging the cloud. I would think that the government and large enterprises would go for private clouds first, while SMBs would leverage the public cloud model.
And when it comes to private clouds, the factors favoured on the Open Source are,
- Offers lower annual cost per server by increasing workload density to optimize utilization without sacrificing performance and agility
- Capability to work with every application, both current and future, without the need to rewrite applications
- Reduced cost through economies of scale
- Flexibility and freedom of choice to run workload and applications in the most efficient and effective places
Can OSS help bring down the cost of transformation in the private Cloud?
Yes, definitely.
International Data Corporation (IDC) believes the public cloud market will grow from $582m in 2009 to $718m in 2014. They think the private cloud market is much larger and growing faster, going from $7.3b to $11.8b during the same period.
Private clouds managed by open source technology to dramatically reduce the cost of hosting and managing application workloads within the firewall. Organizations can test on-premise clouds quickly and efficiently for free and also reduces complexity not only in standing up the cloud but also in configuring systems for business needs. As the need for capacity grows, organizations then have the choice of expanding their on-premise cloud infrastructure, or adding resources from public clouds on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Major cloud service providers providing private cloud implementations are:
- Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud)
- Savvis Symphony VPDC (Virtual Private Data Center)
- Terremark Enterprise Cloud
What is the future outlook for OSS in cloud?
Results from the fifth annual Future of Open Source Survey were released recently, key findings include:
- Respondents identified SaaS, cloud and mobile as the main areas that will impact open source and that are driving growth.
- There are now more than 470 huge open source projects targeting cloud computing.
Another survey by Gartner says - “Cloud Computing- By 2016, all Global 2000 companies will use public cloud services and worldwide cloud services revenue (including public and private services) is forecast to reach $148.8 billion in 2014.”
Server growth is already started shifting to the cloud. The number of servers shipping into public-cloud environments will grow at a 60% CAGR rate through 2013. This migration of workloads from on-premise environments to the public cloud will continue to be the key driver of deciding the infrastructure technology stack.
A new wave of IT is now forming at the intersection of cloud computing, virtualization, and a generalized drive towards simplicity and efficiency. The collective goal of technologies and concepts such as automation, orchestration, and virtualization is to break tight bonds between applications and the underlying physical infrastructure in order to use that infrastructure more efficiently and to change the resources available to those applications on-the-fly.
Open source is clearly a significant part of this new wave. Part of its role is essentially more of the same as open source projects proliferate and mature throughout software ecosystems. Open source benefits such as easy acquisition and trial, ability to modify, and general adherence to standards that have been important to end-users are also equally (or even more) important to the cloud providers delivering a new generation of software services.
Interesting news, Gartner says - by the end of 2010, 1.2 billion people will carry handsets capable of rich, mobile commerce, and by 2014, over 3 billion of the world's adult population will be able to transact electronically via mobile or Internet technology. This opens cloud computing in the mobile platform, as we saw iCloud by Apple, bringing cloud computing to mobile platform, is just a beginning. Forecasts involving mobile app stores, app downloads and revenues have been consistently optimistic, with no end in-site to the growth of open source mobile apps.
Another initiative by the “Open Mobile Alliance Smart Card Web Server” as well as the GSM Association “OneAPI” standard, allows mobile and other network operators to expose useful network information and capabilities to mobile web application developers, widens the possibilities of social communities extending to Mobile platform.
On mobile cloud computing, PocketCloud yet another innovation, a remote desktop service that essentially delivers everything from your PC to your smartphone or tablet, moving all video games online and accessible via smart phone.
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Judul: Open source software stack in Cloud Computing
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