Open Source Facing a Difficult Battle For Cloud Relevance

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."

Comments

Too many anaologies in the summary

[sakdoctor]

But if open-source can hit the bullseye, the rest of the dominoes should fall like a house of cards. Checkmate.

Re:Too many anaologies in the summary

[NewbieProgrammerMan]

For some reason my brain automatically did this:
<Zap_Branigan>

But if open-source can hit the bullseye, the rest of the dominoes should fall like a house of cards. Checkmate.

</Zap_Branigan>

Crybaby

[rodrigoandrade]

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??

Re:Crybaby

[ShieldW0lf]

There's one big huge flawed premise in the article. Free software has already established its relevance. It is the cloud computing concept that has yet to establish its relevance. Even if it does, which is questionable, if it does so by using virtualization of commodity hardware, then the question of what software is being run in the cloud is irrelevant, because all of it will do so. If you are renting computer cycles, the ability to pare things down to the bare bones and tweak the internals is more relevant than ever, which gives the edge in such an environment to open source software. If the question is, what is the group using to operate their cloud, the answer is, who cares? May as well ask the farmer what brand of tractor he uses... it's irrelevant.

headline is backwards

[Punto]

should be "Cloud computing facing a difficult battle for Relevance"

Open source already absolutely relevant

[moderatorrater]

Aren't those vendors built on top of open source? If I remember correctly, Google uses their own Linux distribution, Amazon uses redhat, and I have no clue what salesforce uses but I imagine that it's probably some form of open source OS since they can save a lot of time and money using that instead of Windows when we're talking thousands of servers. The cloud revolution, if anything, was brought on my open source since it's made deploying thousands of servers cheap and easy. If the companies had to pay for licensing of software on all of those servers or roll their own OS, they would have built up (buying fewer, more powerful servers) rather than building out.

Re:Do we really need a cloud?

[rishistar]

Now you come to mention it, we do already have all that in Windows.

OSS also not a big player in cheeseburger market.

[Vellmont]

Maybe I'm missing something big here, but isn't "cloud computing" largely just a data delivery service, and not really "software"? It's kind of hard to get a handle on "cloud computing" since it's such an amorphous buzzword. Can someone give me a real example of an application that's "cloud computing" based. I thought my little weather app telling me the temperature might be defined as "cloud computing".

If the above is true, I don't see how OSS can really make some big impact on "cloud computing" any more than it can make it on websites. If it's not true, how could OSS big a big player in "cloud computing"?

Battle with what?

[Seth Kriticos]

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.

Re:Do we really need a cloud?

[eln]

I really don't understand the long-term value proposition of running your stuff on a public cloud. I can, however, see the IT cost advantages of a properly automated internally managed cloud for internal IT needs. You can get more efficient utilization of hardware and easier administration using virtual servers in a cloud configuration. Of course, there are open source solutions for that, so I'm not sure where the notion that open source can't compete in this area is coming from. Hell, many of the software solutions for this sort of thing are based on the open source Xen these days.

"Cloud" has been, in many venues, too narrowly defined as being "outsourcing to someone else's cloud", when in fact if you already have an IT department that already manages your servers in house, you can probably get more bang for your buck building your own cloud and converting your existing servers to virtual machines running on it.

It's also incredibly dangerous to say the amount of horsepower you have is the most important thing for cloud computing. The most important part of the cloud is the automation and management software. If either of those two things are inadequate, the cloud will be inadequate and very expensive to maintain. The software is the key to a successful cloud implementation. The end result of a successful cloud implementation should be more efficient use of hardware and more efficient and easier administration, resulting in an overall reduction in cost. If the software pieces aren't in place, you won't reach those goals.

Wrong way round

[Archtech]

'In a world where horsepower matters more than the software feeding those "horses"...'

Wrong already! Software does the work - the "what" of solving problems. Hardware, while of course necessary too, is basically a fungible commodity - the "how". To use a counter-intuitive but revealing analogy, software is like the car while hardware plays the role of fuel.

Good software is still fairly rare, whereas state-of-the-market hardware can be cheaply and plentifully obtained from several alternative sources. So the article has it exactly the wrong way round: it's software that is important, and hardware that plays the supporting role.

Re:Salesforce is Software not Hardware

[Bert64]

Cloud computing is in essence one step worse than proprietary software, in that not only is your data locked up in proprietary formats but it's now hosted on someone else's servers too, making you even more dependent on the service provider.
On the other hand, unlike software, they are providing a service with contracts guarantees... I would demand a guarantee of a certain level of uptime, and a guarantee that i can always take my data out in a standard format if i want/need to. Very few proprietary software guarantees you the ability to retain your data in a standard format that can be imported into a competing product or service.