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Open Source Facing a Difficult Battle For Cloud Relevance

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the someone-get-a-rock-and-a-sling dept.

A recent eulogy for open source's relevance to cloud computing by Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady caught the attention of Matt Asay, who breaks down the difficulty of this David and Goliath problem. "In a world where horsepower matters more than the software feeding those 'horses,' in terms of the entry cost to compete, and where big vendors like Amazon and Google are already divvying up the market, the odds of a small-fry, open-source start-up challenging 'Goliath' are slim. It's not a new argument: Nick Carr has been suggesting for some time that only a few, big companies can afford relevance in this hardware-intensive business. Given this fact, O'Grady thinks the best we can hope for (and he thinks it's pretty important) is 'a loose coalition or confederation of [open-source] projects and vendors that will together comprise an increasingly viable top to bottom alternative to some of the cloud providers today.' He includes projects like Puppet (Reductive Labs) and Hadoop in this mix, but is careful to point out that he doesn't see a full-fledged, open-source alternative seriously challenging the closed platforms of Google, Amazon, Salesforce, and the other mega-clouds."

2 of 141 comments (clear)

  1. Crybaby by rodrigoandrade · · Score: 4, Informative

    Really, is this situation THAT MUCH different from what we have today?? What are the chances of a small mom-and-pop start up create a virtual bookstore to rival Amazon, or an Internet services infrastucture empire to rival Google??

  2. Battle with what? by Seth+Kriticos · · Score: 4, Informative

    Come on people, most of Google's and Amazon's could are run by Linux / BSD with costume modifications to adapt to the task at hand.

    If the article would state that these companies are not giving back much to the community in relation to what they take, then yes, that's probably true but they still rely heavily on OSS software.

    For me the whole article completely misses the point, but maybe I'm missing something here.

    Also: cloud computing is not going to take over everything. It is useful for certain situations like massive indexing, data backup storage and some forms of HPC (though the last group mostly build their own data centres or rely on distributed computing). The everyday business will not participate much.