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.

headline is backwards

[Punto]

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

Re:Do we really need a cloud?

[rishistar]

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

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.