The World is Flat

Posted: Monday 17th of October 2011 07:01:11 AM By Brian Flannery

For those of you versed in Socioeconomic analysis, yes - I am borrowing the title of my blog post from Thomas Friedman's book of the same title. Personally, I preferred 'The Lexus and the Olive Tree' by Friedman, but then again this might be because I grew up in the Middle East and saw the subject matter unfolding first hand.

Anyway, enough about politics. But, it has been very interesting to see how Open Source software has done its part to 'flatten' the spaces between individuals, software engineers, infrastructure engineers, architects, and just your general enthusiasts that you would not let near your machine unless you think the idea of a monkey in your server room is somehow helpful (I would fall into the last category). Then again, I guess it would be quite the intruder detection system.

I remember very well (as do most) a time when those in the ecosystem would talk a lot about 'Open Source vs Enterprise'. This was the notion that Enterprises used proprietary, closed-source software, and amateurs in their garage used Open Source.

But that missed the point - Open Source always was and always will be first and foremost a production and distribution model (and of course a contribution model since those are the raw inputs that produce a net output that is then distributed to the community). Open source is not a business model.

It has been really interesting to watch how rapidly Open Source has made inroads at every level of the infrastructure 'stack' - whether it's at the Hypervisor layer (Xen and KVM) OS layer (Red Hat, CentOS, etc.), Database (MySQL, Postgres), Middleware (JBoss, Apache, SpringSource), etc. etc.

I have spent the better part of 8 years chatting with Architects, Execs, Sys Admins - whomever - at hundreds of publicly traded companies. The extent to which they use one or more Open Source components in their core infrastructure has rapidly increased, but nowhere has this been as true as in Cloud computing.

This trend has been exciting to watch, but it is also completely flattening the traditional Open Source adoption model (in this case flattening is a good thing). Normally, as our CEO Marten Mickos likes to say, you would have Open Source enter a space as a 'disruptor of the old'. Nowadays Open Source cloud computing is becoming the 'innovator of the new'.

Whether it is Eucalyptus, OpenStack, CloudStack, or any number of the dozen or so others that occasionally are mentioned in the space, the expectation from large companies is increasingly that they start straight with Open Source. There are obvious benefits you always see with Open Source, but the fact so many enterprises are willing to start at this point, rather than arrive there has been pretty amazing.

And it's not just at the IaaS layer you see such a high percentage of Open Source based products gaining widespread adoption. They are numerous examples in other cloud disciplines as well (OpenShift, CumuLogic, Cloudera, Puppet, Opscode, etc. etc.)

That's why I enjoy this space so much. It's very young, but it has already turned a lot of how organizations are used to consuming technology on it's head (for the better). For example, each year I at am VMworld, I see more, and more, and more Open Source products and users at the event. I cannot wait to see what CloudExpo and similar events have in store.

It's been an interesting few years - I remember very well when many, many analysts and 'thought leaders' in IT Infrastructure doubted the idea of 'Private Cloud' altogether, just as they used to question the readiness of Open Source for primetime. Of course, both notions have been flipped on their head.

So, why not take part in this wave? What are you waiting for? Whether you are a blogger, an analyst, a sys admin, an Infrastructure Architect, an IT Manager, or even one of those guys that wears a suit and tie to work, whether you realize it or not you are all part of the Open Source infrastructure community. And a 'contribution' is not just code. It can be testing, posting in the forum, starting a local meet-up group, blogging, or any number of other things.

Happy Clouding! And remember - if you have questions or need to pull your parachute, Eucalyptus are here to help :)