The Importance of Open Source to Open Clouds
http://sg.redhat.com/about/news/archive/2012/4/The-Importance-of-Open-Source-to-Open-Clouds
The Importance of Open Source to Open Clouds
By:
Red Hat Cloud Computing Team
Open
clouds aren't only about open source. But open
source is the sine qua non.
Open source
puts the customer in control and can free them from the
technology decisions and business practices of any single
vendor. This is important because even the best-intentioned
vendors have to ultimately make choices about product
roadmaps, pricing approaches, and target markets that may or
may not align with the needs of a particular customer.
Vendors get acquired, go out of business, and shift
technology focus. That's life. And, with proprietary
software, you as a customer ultimately may not have many
options if your vendor isn't willing or able to support your
needs or, indeed, to continue selling you software at all.
Your only recourse may be to shift to another vendor, even
if that means overhauling a large chunk of your
infrastructure. Open source can crack open this
lock-in.
We see great examples of the
power of an open approach within Red Hat CloudForms, Red
Hat's all-open source Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
hybrid cloud management software that is currently in beta.
One of the components of CloudForms is Deltacloud, a top-level project under
the governance of the Apache Software Foundation. Deltacloud
is an API that abstracts the differences between clouds.
However, unlike proprietary software in which a vendor
decides what will be supported by an API and what won't,
Deltacloud makes it easier for developers to write drivers
that modularly add support for the cloud providers of their
choice.
This sort of flexibility is
especially important in a cloud computing environment in
which attaining the greatest value comes from spanning an
entire heterogeneous IT infrastructure. By cutting across
silos of capacity, IT organizations can greatly simplify
their environments and thereby redirect people and
capitalfrom keeping the light on to driving innovation for
their business.
Open source isn't just
about avoiding lock-in, important as that is. Open source
allows users to control their destiny and provides them with
visibility into the technology on which they're basing their
business. This is increasingly important as businesses are
ever-more driven by what technology makes possible from data
analytics to mobile devices to real-time telemetry. Open
source provides the headlights that can give businesses an
early view into what may be possible in the years ahead and
therefore how to position their business to take the
greatest advantage of these coming
possibilities.
But open source has the
potential to go far beyond how individual organizations can
leverage it in isolation. Open source also lets them
collaborate with othercommunities and companies to help
drive innovation in the areas that are important to them. We
see this approach increasingly coming to the fore in this
complex and connected world. Companies have seen how open
source can createsoftware that is not just a good value but
that increasingly pushes forward the state of the art.
Consequently, we see end-user organizations working
cooperatively and in cooperation with vendors to drive
innovations that areimportant to them in areas such as
messaging and, yes, cloud.
Cloud
computing started out, in many respects, as a user-driven
phenomenon. “Shadow IT” use of consumer-oriented cloud
services and public cloud providers set new expectations for
IT departments. And with Linux and open source at the core
of almost every major cloud provider, IT departments may
have more choice as they seek to meet those expectations.
With Linux and open source also prevalent throughout the
Fortune 500 and other organizations worldwide, powering some
of the largest and most mission-critical applications, who
wouldn't want open source for their
cloud?
ENDS