Demand is growing for easy access to data across multiple platforms and devices - and, the move to cloud computing is increasing pressure to create a more open and programmable web.
What is a more open and programmable web?
The "open web" (if you will) is one where we all share a common approach to the exposure of our data so that it can be consumed, analysed and even "leveraged" (if you will excuse the expression) to create and extract additional value.
What do we use to build the open web?
The technical answer -- Built on standards such as HTTP, JSON and AtomPub, OData is a web protocol for unlocking and sharing data -- freeing it from so-called "silos" that exist in some software applications today. The OData protocol supports serialisation in multiple popular formats, including JSON and Atom/XML.
The simple answer -- With OData, developers are able to build cross-platform web and mobile applications.
The OData protocol has evolved through an open process on the public OData site during the past three years.
"To accomplish the goal of open data for the open web, we have seen a push for support to enable access to and use of data across platforms, applications and devices," said Jean Paoli, president, Microsoft Open Technologies Inc. "Taking steps to standardise OData through OASIS allows developers to act on the data in a more well-defined way."
The Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) in San Francisco this week has spurred an industry analysis report detailing "findings" which assert that open source technologies are leading innovation in major technology segments including mobile, cloud and big data.
Are they serious?
Open source innovation and cloud plus big data is all cutting edge then -- and we need the sixth annual Future of Open Source Survey to tell us this by all accounts.
According to the marketing-spun perlustration habitués at BlackDuck Software, "The quality of open source, and the ability to continuously improve, is now one of the top reasons for its adoption."
Are they serious?
Open source produces quality software does it? This is surely doing open source an injustice by failing to report on the core tenets and driving principles of what the open community contribution model really brings to software application development.
Plus -- good proprietary software is known for EXACTLY the same reasons i.e. quality and continual improvement.
Did they mean to say that professionally managed open source software application development should (and indeed is) finding successful deployment in many fully-functioning enterprise-scale operations today in the same way that we may have only imagined proprietary software to do so ten of fifteen years ago?
If they did mean that, then why didn't they say it?
More than 700 respondents - took part in the 2012 survey, including representatives from both vendor and non-vendor communities.
So is any of it of interest? Yes, here are the good bits...
• "Open source is leading, not following, in important areas including cloud, big data, mobile apps and enterprise mobility."
• Respondents predicted that the top two trends for open source by 2015 will be the adoption of OSS in non-technical segments (e.g., health care, automotive, government) followed by general enterprise adoption, reflecting maturation in the OSS segment.
• Nearly half (43 percent) of respondents named "project maturity" as the most important factor when choosing an open source project for integration into a product or service.
Perhaps better than the fluffy "Open Innovation On Demand" headline that this story initially ran with, it would have been better reading...
Open Source Now Leading Mature Projects Across Wider Industry Verticals
Open source Business Intelligence (BI) vendor Actuate has gone on the tech dating game and formed a new collaboration to match its BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools) with the Hortonworks data platform to enable big data visualisation technologies.
The open source iteration of BIRT was the result of another IT "date" as it was developed by Actuate and IBM.
BIRT is said to be able to add "business-intelligence functionality" to applications such as those using the Hortonworks data platform, which in itself an open-source distribution of Apache Hadoop software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications.
"We have dedicated significant resources to make Apache Hadoop more robust and easier to integrate, extend, deploy and use," said John Kreisa, VP of marketing at Hortonworks.
"Actuate's collaboration with Hortonworks will ease the transition from Big Data hype to Big Data usefulness," said Nobby Akiha, senior vice president of marketing at Actuate.
So this is not Horton Hears A Who, this is Who Hears Hortonworks -- time enough for an ode to Dr Seuss anyway...
Who Hears Hortonworks
Do you like big data and Hadoop?
If big data scoops, then it might be Hadoop.
For analysis we could choose a course of open source,
Open source is the course to choose, of course.
Do you prefer better visualisation and better decision making?
I prefer it to poor insight, I prefer it to baking.
Hortonworks distributed processing eats big data, any size,
Intuitive data any size, but from this we must visualise.
The US Army and associated federal agencies are said to be testing prototype "virtual world" technologies in a secure open source environment.
Intended to simulate "in theatre" scenarios to stimulate team building skills and wider training and analysis initiatives, the work to test out as many as 400 use cases is being carried out in the Research Lab Simulation and Training Technology Center in Orlando.
The test environment is known as the Military Open Simulator Enterprise Strategy, or (MOSES) for short.
MOSES arrives after the US military's previous experiments with Second Life.
US-based website www.arl.army.mil/ reports as follows:
"These types of technologies allow multiple users in various locations to experience 3-D interactions simultaneously using digital representations called avatar, thus providing widespread benefits such as distance learning, collaboration, cultural training and outreach via multiple-person, real-time interaction."
MOSES is intended to act as an experimental platform only i.e. it is not planned (at this stage) to be developed into a formal virtual training platform for the US Army.
Typical training scenarios could involve so-termed "Naval Undersea Warfare". Use of open source technologies here in the graphical virtualisation space are said to allow for the most creative and useful rapid prototyping environments to be created, changed and further experimented with.
Associated with this area of 3-D learning are headsets capable of monitoring and measuring a user's brainwaves in order to track not only human "vital signs", but also emotions from anger to frustration or boredom and excitement.
Content and data is everything right? But device usage at the enterprise level necessitates real-time integration, or that data becomes less valuable and potentially even worthless if it exists in some standalone silo.
But data integration is always complex and fraught with inconsistencies, incongruencies and incompatibilities.
So how do we address these challenges?
FuseSource Corp. produces open-source integration and messaging products to achieve what it likes to brand as "Integration Everywhere" -- and "everywhere" in this case means from the data centre to innumerable suppliers, customers, machines and devices etc.
The company's software is used to control data integration demands from the Aston Martin assembly line to the Large Hadron Collider.
Essentially, this technology is an open-source, standards-based messaging platform that can be deployed in any development environment with an incredibly small footprint.
Elastic infrastructures!
Or to put it another way -- an "elastic infrastructure" for better data integration.
To pay lip service to FuseSource's tools, the company produces the
Fuse ESB Enterprise 7.0 integration platform and the Fuse MQ Enterprise 7.0 open-source, standards-based messaging platform.
"The pace of business today increasingly demands an elastic infrastructure that's impossible to build without enterprise-class open source integration and messaging," said Steve Williams, director at Apex Networks. , an IT support provider that created the system used by the U.K.'s automotive clubs and insurance companies to communicate with recovery vehicles, garages and first responders that provide roadside assistance to 32 million drivers.
"FuseSource products and services enabled us to effectively integrate each tow truck into a constantly changing enterprise that provides operators with the real-time information they need to best assist stranded motorists. Plus, we're using the same technology to create some of the world's most advanced logistics systems for brands like Aston Martin, Jaguar and McLaren that demand the utmost precision in their supply and demand chain."
"To create the Control System for the Large Hadron Collider and its Injectors at CERN, we needed a messaging infrastructure that would enable us to monitor and operate the thousands of pieces of equipment that play a role in its operation 24 hours per day, 365 days a year," said Felix Ehm, technical engineer in the Beams Department at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).
"We needed a messaging technology able to scale to dramatically changing demands with utmost reliability while accommodating the numerous operating systems and communications protocols in use within the scientific community. We trusted in ActiveMQ as an open source messaging system from the very beginning in 2005 and today we can say our decision was beneficial. It's clear that open source integration and messaging addressed our needs."
The UK government appears to be taking positive (possibly even 'assertive') steps towards more implementation of open source technologies at this time. The Open Government Summit today will be held on 30th May in Central Hall Westminster and speakers have just been announced.
While the UK public sector is arguably far better at organising "congressional summits" than it is at decisive implementation and action, there will reportedly be examination and analysis into how the open source model allows public sector organisations to be more efficient, save money, meet mission-critical IT demands and improve their services.
Government and institutional speakers include "suits" from the Home Office and the Met Office plus Graham Taylor who is CEO of OpenForum Europe and Gerry Gavigan, who is chair of the Open Source Consortium.
The summit will also host a Q&A session with celebrated tech writer Glyn Moody, author of "Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution".
Opportunities, challenges and myths
Panel discussions and 'open mic' sessions will also feature... the aim and intention being to create some clarity around the "opportunities, challenges and myths" surrounding the use of open source in the public sector.
Aingaran Pillai, CEO of Zaizi and organiser of the summit explains: "With this first event we want to bring together government, industry and development communities to start a dialogue about how to practically apply open source in the UK's public sector. We have seen how other countries' governments have been able to lower their costs while improving security, transparency and public participation and believe that open source is the answer to many challenges the UK public sector is currently facing."
A new open source Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution with built in "CRM gamification" techniques has surfaced this month in beta version release form.
The 'tablet-ready' Zurmo claims to provide a means to "engage users at every level" in the pursuit of CRM excellence.
Zurmo says that CRM could be great, if only it were used more and that users lack the incentive to log in and makes notes pertaining to customer feedback and requests at every opportunity.
According to Zurmo, its 'game engine' tackles this issue head on by offering the user short term gains for these repetitive tasks.
But how will this work?
"Those of you already familiar with the theme of gamification will be familiar with the idea of rewarding points, reaching levels, and achieving badges for performing otherwise undesirable actions," said the company, in a press statement.
Gamification features then include the following:
• Point allocation
• General Leveling
• Progressive Badges
• Game Achievement Alerts
• Leader boards - weekly, monthly and overall
The software is written in PHP and utilises jQuery, the Yii Framework and RedBeanPHP. The company says that "robust stability" is achieved through the "zealous use" of a test-driven development methodology.
"The Zurmo project has really taken off with developers and programmers rallying around the project worldwide. Due to its open source nature and clean code, developers are using Zurmo as a base for building customised, robust database solutions," states Zurmo co-founder and lead architect Jason Green.
Cisco has been particularly vocal of late with regard to the impact of intelligent software application management of networks, especially in regard to its work with the OpenFlow protocol.
The OpenFlow protocol falls into the category of Software-Defined Networking (SDN).
What is of Software-Defined Networking (SDN)?
SDN promises to elevate the management of the company network above the physical structure of machines and instead focus on actual behaviour of traffic flows so that (via a layer of software programmability) the network can be managed as a whole entity rather than a collection of individual machines.
OpenFlow and its part in the growing SDN ecosphere started out life as a Stanford University research project in 2008.
Reports suggest that Cisco now employs an element of OpenFlow in its broader strategy to bring software programmability intelligence to the network stack -- but this is not the whole story.
Indeed, on the road to the (software-defined) network, Cisco will also seek to bring additional programmability intelligence to existing networks by opening up IOS and NX-OS for third-party development.
NOTE: IOS (not to be confused with Apple's iOS) is the firm's Internet Operating System software used in most of its routers and network switches. NX-OS is a network operating system designed by Cisco for its Nexus-series Ethernet switches and fibre channel storage.
So is it all plain sailing? Not necessarily...
Writing on TechTarget's SearchNetworking executive editor Rivka Gewirtz Little suggests that OpenFlow stalwarts have insisted that proprietary software-defined networking (SDN) methods will "hamper the evolution" of an innovative open-source network application development community.
"OpenFlow can do more than centralise the control plane of the network for granular management. Third-party developers can create applications, such as orchestration, security and mobility management, which can work on any OpenFlow-based network regardless of vendor," writes Gewirtz Little.
Cisco for its part is probably playing a careful game here i.e. the company wants to be seen to promote open standards to a degree, but of course the bulk of its cash cow comes from what is indeed a more proprietary base of networking technologies.
The company is a member of the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) and also acts as in a technical advisory role to the board overseeing the onward development of the OpenFlow standard. But with a large installed base of its equipment out there already, clearly nobody wants to see a wide-scale network rip-and-replace strategy initiated.
TechTarget's Gewirtz Little suggests that Cisco will now more likely pursue a multi-prong approach where virtual and physical networks are interwoven so that the "intelligence" rests in the switches that reside inside the network itself. In this scenario, data can still be collected and analysed for policy management decisions.
Directly at Cisco, the company's David Ward comments as follows:
"Once you take that step back and can separate "game-changing" from the "industry-shifting" movements, you can fundamentally break down why we believe that SDN is a piece of a larger puzzle. Software Defined Networks are a great game-changer likely to help many companies provide new services -- it is definitely something we see as beneficial and are working on. However, when I dig into what we're truly working on and the ripples that we (and a few of our customers) think this will have, we see market evolution. Something that affects not only how people build technology or products or scale and operate them, but something that makes people look at their business differently."
Or as Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior puts it, "Not all customers want programmability. It's a very small subset that wants programmability. A lot of our customers are happy to leave everything to us to allow them to be programmed. So we have to be careful that we don't equate software-defined networking with only one aspect of it."
The network, many are saying, is experiencing a sea change.
Dell is aiming to boldly go where no cosmonaut or programmer has gone before and build an open source laptop designed specifically for developers.
Project Sputnik is a six-month effort based on Ubuntu 12.04 and Dell's XPS13 laptop.
According to Dell's developer blogger Barton George, the firm wants to serve developers with a practicable Linux box that works from the "get go" i.e. without the need to traverse a variable landscape of driver and library downloads and installs that would typically be experienced with a Windows-based machine.
The project was apparently initiated after George met with Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady who suggested that although many vendors do indeed sell laptops that will run Linux, a dedicated Linux-from-the-ground-up machine (that was "powerful" enough for developers) did not necessarily exist up until now.
According to Dell's George, "As we continued talking to customers and developers the topic of Ubuntu kept coming up and we came across a fair number of devs who were asking for a Dell laptop specifically based on it. To my knowledge, no other OEM has yet made a system specifically targeted at devs and figured it was time to see what that might mean."
Facebook likes the Open Compute Project's approach to sharing more efficient server and data center designs with the wider IT industry -- well, it did initiate the scheme in the first place after all.
During this week's Open Compute Summit the company has made its stripped-down storage and rack data centre designs available to the community and also pledged to develop a new standard for rack design itself, which will be logically named Open Rack.
According to the Open Rack website this will be the first rack standard that's designed for data centers, integrating the rack into the data center infrastructure, "Part of the Open Compute Project's 'grid to gates' philosophy, a holistic design process that considers the interdependence of everything from the power grid to the gates in the chips on each motherboard."
Open Compute Project chairman and Facebook's director of technical operations Frank Frankovsky has suggested that Open Rack has the potential to "completely standardise" the mechanical and electrical interfaces of data centre racks almost as if it were a new hardware-based API in interconnectivity terms.
Facebook's open hardware efforts with the Open Compute Project started in April 2011 and were initially focused on servers as a stand-alone technical proposition.
Subsequently, the project has been established as an independent foundation and also set to work on areas including motherboards, server racks and other ancillary data storage hardware components.
Reports suggest that Facebook's design efforts will tackle airflow challenges associated with server cooling issues and ultimately lead to more efficient (and therefore lower cost) data centre design.
Monday this week saw the Tizen development team unveil its first non-beta release to provide developers with source code and software development kit (SDK) support.
Programmers digging into the SDK will be able to use a new new browser-based simulator and a faster emulator -- equally, those diving straight to the source code will find new route searching features in location-aware application plus WiFi Direct and additional HTML5 support.
Wi-Fi CERTIFIED Wi-Fi Direct™ is a certification mark for devices supporting a game-changing new technology enabling Wi-Fi devices to connect directly, making it simple and convenient to do things like print, share, synch and display.
Colorado-based application lifecycle management (ALM) player Rally has this week used its annual RallyON conference to host a live App Hackathon to demonstrate the benefits of its social-coding environment.
The company has a new partnership with open code repository GitHub to help provide this social-coding platform for Rally's development community.
With over 2,000 customer-created apps to date, Rally says it creates new ways for the larger ALM community to browse, share and learn how apps are created and customised for individual needs.
Ideas already tabled this year include two developers who propose:
"An interactive chart showing a sort of cumulative flow for the count of software defects of various 'ages vs. priorities' over time, with the ability to drill down into specific defects. I will call this a Defect Composition Evolution Chart."
"A Kanban board with a timeline slider that allows you to see the state of your Kanban board at any point in time, maybe I could calls it a Kanban Time Machine."
NOTE: Created by father of the Toyota production line system Taiichi Ohno, Kanban is a method through which JIT (Just-In-Time) processes are achieved. Just-In-Time champions reduced in-process inventory and its associated carrying costs for leaner production.
If it works in the car factory, who says it can't work in the software factory then right?
Rally's Steve Wolfe writes on the company blog, "The spirit of a Hack-a-thon is to collaboratively build features and applications, with engineers coming together to work in an area of personal interest with little to no restriction around the direction of the programming.
"GitHub is proud to enable Rally's developer community to work together with anyone to build and improve awesome Apps for Rally's Agile ALM platform," said Chris Wanstrath, co-founder and CEO of GitHub.
Rally offers customisation and extension options for creating a single source of record for decision-making across global development organisations.
Western Australia's Murdoch University has pioneered an open source project designed to build drag-and-drop style web-based user interfaces suitable for supercomputers.
While the particle physicist, computer science and computational physics communities are all comparatively adept when it comes to juggling command line level code operation, the same skills do not typically translate over to the men in white coats tasked with looking after comparative genomics research.
NOTE:news-medical.net defines Genomics as: the study of the genomes of organisms -- the field includes efforts to determine the entire deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) sequence of organisms and fine-scale genetic mapping efforts. The human biological data contained in a genome is encoded in its DNA structures, which is then subdivided into 'discrete units' called genes.
Scientists at Murdoch University set out to build Yabi to simplify access to supercomputing infrastructures for end users.
"Yabi has radically transformed the way we process and analyse 2nd generation DNA sequence data. Through a user-friendly dynamic HTML interface we can design a simple pipeline that sorts, trims and queries sequence data against databases -- we put raw data in one end and obtain meaningful outputs at the end of the pipeline. Put simply, Yabi has enabled us to spend more time analysing the actual data and less time 'fighting' it," said Dr Michael Bunce, ARC Future Fellow, Ancient DNA Lab, School of Biological Sciences and Biotechnology, Murdoch University.
In related news...
Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) specialist Nvidia has detailed updates concerning news that the world's largest genomics institute is launching a cloud-based next-generation sequencing (NGS) bioinformatics research service accelerated by Nvidia hardware.
China-based BGI has combined automated pipeline analysis with software and tools to be integrated with the industry's largest sequencing platform. The intention is to provide information for biologists, bioinformaticists and physicians to submit and receive an automated analysis of DNA sequencing data.
The question remains -- how many bioinformaticists, particle physicists and computational physics specialists does it take to change a light bulb?
IBM took its time to release its new PowerLinux systems and solutions series and with good reason; the company wanted to host the cream of the enterprise-grade Linux crop on its shiny new black boxes.
What are these units?
IBM PowerLinux systems are intended to... "exploit the cost efficiency of Linux and virtualisation" for business-critical workloads using Red Hat and SUSE.
Business-critical workloads?
Oh sorry, that means Big Data analysis and the management of industry-specific applications -- it also means work to create open source infrastructure services.
So Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and SUSE means Canonical's Ubuntu too right?
Umm, nope.
Reports suggest that Canonical opted out of joining this new merry gang and Ubuntu will not be offered on this new server family.
According to IBM, the new PowerLinux solutions offer "deep integration" of new Linux-specific POWER7 processor-based hardware with industry-standard Linux software from Red Hat and SUSE.
"By basing the new solutions on lower cost Linux-specific Power Systems and PowerVM for Linux virtualisation technology, IBM can help provide more value to customers at a lower cost than others offering Linux on other commodity x86 servers," said the company, in a press statement.
Big Blue expands thusly, "In addition, replacing aging x86-based Windows servers with PowerLinux systems and utilising open source applications, clients may further reduce costs by reducing or eliminating high proprietary software license fees and upgrade charges."
So what happened to Ubuntu?
Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth has reportedly said that "mutual agreement" led to his firm's lack of support for the new IBM PowerLinux systems.
Suggesting that there was a "little to no overlap" between the Ubuntu and and IBM Power user bases, Shuttleworth has pointed to Ubuntu's greater usage and suitability for deployment in server farm environments while IBM's latest line has indeed been tuned for specialised mission-critical deployments.
Shuttleworth might be right, but if Red Hat and SUSE want to be in IBM's high-end server gang then it is surely a brave man that turns his back on that market.
Nobody ever got fired for buying an IBM enterprise-grade Linux-specific POWER7 processor-based hardware solution -- did they?
Forrester Research software application development analyst Jeffrey Hammond views the programmer world as an ecosystem polarised into two extremes.
Writing on his Forrester blog, Hammond identifies two different developer communities:
1. Group 1: the "inside the firewall crowd"
2. Group 2: the "outside the firewall crowd."
Group 1
Group 1 inside the firewall developers are characterised by their proximity to either .NET or Java in terms of their development environment and will very typically use application servers and Relational Database Management Systems in the normal course of their work.
Simply put, Group 1 are the Volvo driving, GPS SatNav using married with two kids kind of guys.
This is NOT to suggest for one second that these developers are ANY less creative, maverick, wacky and/or off the wall -- it is simply to suggest that they enjoy using familiar proven tools that come with a manufacturer's guarantee and possible even a rubber handle grip.
As Hammond puts in, "They worry about security and governance."
Group 2
Group 2 outside the firewall developers are multilingual (in terms of programming language of course), may very likely be younger in their years, be more independent of any particular vendor ties and, crucially they embrace open source and the community contribution model as the basis and foundation for everything that they do.
As Hammond puts it, "The first group thinks web services are done with SOAP; the second does them with REST and JSON. The first group thinks MVC, the second thinks "pipes and filters" and eventing. I could go on and on with the comparison."
Hammond goes on to explain the concept of the wider "open web" and calls for Group 1 more traditional developers to become more open in their general outlook.
The nonprofit Linux Foundation will host a new open cloud conference 'cleverly' named CloudOpen 2012 from August 29-31 this year in San Diego.
CloudOpen is expected to be a vendor-neutral meeting of minds to discuss the open source projects, products and companies that are driving cloud and big data ecosystems.
CloudOpen will feature technical content that includes, but is not limited to Chef, Gluster, Hadoop, KVM, Linux, oVirt, Puppet, and Xen, as well as big data strategies and open cloud platforms and tools.
This conference will also cover open source best practices and how they relate to topics such as company data and APIs.
"This conference is built on one belief: open works. We know this from experience and know that the cloud demands it in order to be successful for the long term," said The Linux Foundation's Amanda McPherson.
"Because Linux, open source software and collaborative development are the foundations of the cloud, it's important to provide a vendor-neutral forum where those who are committed to openness can advance this work and users and industry can learn about 'open' as it is related to the cloud."
Founding sponsors of CloudOpen include Dell, Canonical, Citrix, Eucalyptus Systems, HP, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, NEC, Puppet Labs and SUSE.
Twitter has this month confirmed that it will take now make a positive and concrete contribution to the open source community by acting as an official sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF).
Reports suggest that this could be the first of several moves toward open source by Twitter as the company now recognises the ASF's organisational, legal and financial support for a broad range of open source software projects that Twitter itself "consumes and contributes" to.
The Twitter engineering blog confirmed the company feels this sponsorship is the "right thing to do" as it will help sustain existing Twitter projects already overseen by the ASF's supporting infrastructure.
According to Chris Aniszczy at the Twitter Open Source Office, "Many projects at Twitter rely on open source technologies, and as we evolve as a company, our commitment to open source continues to increase."
"One example is the Mesos project, which is now being developed inside the ASF Incubator and is nearing its first official release. Within Twitter, Mesos runs on hundreds of production machines and makes it easier to execute clustered jobs that do everything from running services to handling our analytics workload," said Aniszczy.
NOTE: Apache Mesos is a cluster manager that provides resource isolation and sharing across distributed applications, or frameworks.
Once upon a time, (in December 2011 actually) Citrix Systems acquired Cloud.com and its CloudStack software infrastructure platform.
Citrix loved its citizens and said that CloudStack should be free and open for all the people in the land and so gave it to the Apache people.
Meanwhile, neighbours in the OpenStack encampment had a big party and invited lots of vendors to contribute and show that multiple open cloud platforms could all exist together and live happily ever after.
The big people at VMware and Amazon didn't always take that much notice of what was happening down in the villager's community and so just got on with ruling their empires and having a nice time.
During the battle of the API wars many people fought valiantly, but then CloudStack said they would support the Amazon API as it was the nicest and the shiniest.
Then what happened was Eucalyptus Systems went to the town square on in March 2012 and told everyone that Amazon Web Services and Eucalyptus had sat down to eat some roast boar and sign an agreement that enables customers to more efficiently migrate workloads between their existing data centers and AWS while using the same management tools and skills across both environments.
Lots of people were happy and some people thought that the cloud API wars were finally over, so there was lots of dancing and singing and more roast boar.
VMware didn't feel as happy as everyone else and so wrote a blog on the town hall notice board telling people that the major open source cloud computing platforms were ugly sisters.
The nice man from VMware said that, "Last week, while the ugly sisters were squabbling, customers were getting on with business and choosing their Cinderella as VMware quietly passed the 100 vCloud service provider mark."
Prince Charming (the customer) was a very clever and shrewd man and could see that there was lots of backbiting going on, so he adopted an open hybrid approach throughout his kingdom that have him gateways to use proprietary services when he wanted to.
They all blogged (and may eventually live) happily ever after.
Red Hat is not backward about coming forward with its opinions in the open source arena these days. I recently reported on the company's work with OpenShift and I left out most the comments made about some of the other vendors during briefings in London at that time.
Without mentioning who was criticised, suffice it to say that Red Hat is bullishly confident about its position in the industry.
No surprise then that Red Hat would want to voice its most "fulsome opinions" on news of the launch of Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc
Naturally Red Hat took interest, the company tells us. Here's the official reaction in full:
1 -- Customers and developers are potentially the winners in what could (should!) be a more open world.
Open source and open standards give customers and developers freedom. Interoperability makes more possible. Our hope is that this formal announcement signals the commitment of Microsoft to engage with open source communities in a way that will ultimately provide choice in the marketplace. An open world is a better world.
2 -- A rising tide lifts all ships.
The power of open source is undeniable. As we look toward the 10th anniversary of Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the market, we are able to reflect on how we got here. It was not without opposition. But we now see the world's leading technology providers investing in open source as a strategic way to innovate. Some of the new entrants are surprising, but open source collaboration works when many are participating in earnest.
3 -- We are here to help.
Making a dramatic commitment to open source and open standards is not trivial. It's not an occasional announcement or participation in a consortium. Making a true commitment to being open becomes part of a culture and is a radical shift. For years Red Hat has helped partners and customers navigate what it means to be open and how to make a full commitment.
We truly believe that open source and open standards are foundational elements in how technologies, such as cloud computing, will be developed and deployed. We believe in open source and extend a hand as an old hand in this movement to support those with similar dedication.
California-based Eucalyptus Systems has coined a new term to describe part of the developer's imperative to now help move and migrate (some) cloud computing driven applications from public cloud infrastructures to new hybrid models.
"Blending Clouds" is the firm's take on emerging usage patterns and the architectural principals behind this approach.
Eucalyptus points to initial moves taken by firms who have chosen to place applications live in the public cloud, as it provides an "attractive alternative" to purchasing data center infrastructure.
However -- and it's a big however...
According to a recent press statement from Eucalyptus, "As demand grows over time, companies may make the decision to move applications behind the firewall to optimise infrastructure performance, security for mission critical apps and cost. Alternatively, some companies expect their private cloud investment to provide an onramp to the public cloud. For this reason, today's private cloud investments should accommodate public cloud futures"
Hybrid, dovetails & blends
Not content with spinning in the use of "blending", Eucalyptus also asserts that public and private clouds are quickly "dovetailing" to enable blended scenarios based on (and here's the $64,000 dollar challenge...) dynamic optimisations for price, policy and performance.
The firm's on-premise cloud computing platform is based around open-source software components that its development says it uses without modification. So once again as are seeing so prevalently with OpenStack and its open standards in the cloud space, open clouds good - closed proprietary clouds not always so good.
"There are two advantages that we immediately enjoy as a result of this decision. First, because we do not make changes to these packages, we automatically incorporate any improvements or upgrades that the open-source community has contributed. Secondly, by choosing open-source components that are common to most freely available Linux distributions, Eucalyptus can run in pre-existing Linux installations without the addition or modification of the installed software infrastructure," said the company.
The firm's David Butler has said that hybrid clouds don't emerge by chance -- instead, they require thoughtful, considered planning and resilient enterprise-grade foundations.
A cloudy mélange?
Ed: he said hybrid, didn't he mean dovetail-blended-mélange-ombination-potpourri clouds?
Eucalyptus is of the mind that cloud platforms should be modularised so that they can support multiple APIs and virtualisation environments. Thus while the initial versions of the firm's system supported the AWS APIs and Xen hypervisor platform, Eucalyptus is designed to support multiple APIs and virtualisation environments simultaneously, in the same cloud.
These industry moves come in the same week that cloud computing service company Rackspace has launched the world's first large-scale, production ready cloud, powered by OpenStack.
Built on OpenStack, the new cloud offering incorporates a what has been described as "robust portfolio" of cloud solutions such as Cloud Servers, Cloud Databases, Cloud Block Storage, Cloud Networks, a completely new cloud Control Panel, Cloud Monitoring and support for the OpenStack API.
The open cloud is here!
"The open era of the cloud is a reality and Rackspace has positioned itself at the forefront of this massive, technological shift," said Lanham Napier, CEO of Rackspace.
"We're drawing a line in the sand against proprietary cloud providers. With this launch, Rackspace is providing an open cloud alternative, backed by Fanatical Support and our core expertise on OpenStack, to deliver a strong product portfolio that will help customers navigate their way through an increasingly complex cloud environment."
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