The open cloud

There are couple of different areas that people are typically looking for when they investigate cloud computing for their business, namely:

1. Flexible infrastructure that will scale dynamically as needed with pricing that scales accordingly.   They can then deploy existing or new applications/services onto this infrastructure.
2. Applications/services available on the cloud that they can start using straight away with minimal change while scaling the number of users dynamically as needed – sometimes known as SaaS.

Right now the second option is limited in terms of the number and type of solutions available, with a few established players such as Salesforce.com getting most attention.  There are of course a number of niche SaaS solutions available but these tend to be quite closed in nature and don’t really offer any kind of platform for growth.  Hopefully this will change over time providing greater choice to customers with more vendors and services available including open source options.

The first option of using cloud computing infrastructure is growing in popularity as it provides a more cost effective and scalable solution for deploying new applications whilst not constraining enterprises from having to pick from the somewhat limited selection of SaaS solutions available in the market.

The large established solutions in the cloud infrastructure solution space include Amazon EC2, Google AppEngine and Microsoft Azure.  However there is much more choice becoming available with a number of interesting open source solutions emerging.

Slight digression but does anyone care if the infrastructure is open source or not ?  Well you should care as having people share the code underpinning these technologies will allow a greater number of solutions to be developed with faster evolution and improvement of the technology which is better for everyone.   Good analogy is to think of science where information and discoveries are freely shared allowing for further and faster progress and advancement in many areas – open source brings that free sharing and progress philosophy to software.

So here are some of the open source initiatives worth looking at in the cloud computing infrastructure space.  Not only are they interesting of themselves but some of them like Hadoop are building blocks that can and are being used in assembling other initiatives and solutions.

• Open source cloud computing platforms
  • Joyent – uses OpenSolaris and OpenSocial
  • Eucalyptus – education driven project supporting Amazon’s EC2 interface
  • Reservoir – European initiative with backing from IBM
  • Enomaly – uses RedHat’s libvert for virtualisation
• Open source massively parallel distributed database technology
  • 10gen – support for the MongoDB product
  • Hypertable – modelled after Google’s BigTable project
  • Hbase – uses the Hadoop file system
• Open source cloud computing components
  • Reductivelabs - provides cloud infrastructure tools Puppet and Facter
  • Hadoop – Apache highly scalable distributed filesystem used by HBase and other projects
  • OpenNebula – virtual machine management, used in Reservoir project

Learn->Share->Improve – collectively we can build and assemble the open cloud computing platform giving everyone more choice at lower cost.