The Sky is Clear

Open Source Takover of the Cloud

I'm exhausted. Trying to keep up with all the recent announcements on cloud computing and open source is becoming a full time job. In just the past week we had two announcements from Facebook with Open Compute and VMware with Cloud Foundry in the cloud computing space. Both companies, long time public supporters of open source are natural fits in both the cloud computing space and open source world; just kidding. It really is something to see non-open source friendly companies decide that the strategy most likely to succeed in cloud computing is open source. The list of companies and projects having a significant impact in cloud computing are closely tied to open source with Amazon and Microsoft being the central players at this time with closed source solutions. What should we make of this?

It seems clear to me that the future of cloud computing will have significant open source representation from the get-go without having to play catch-up in the way that Linux took on Windows after Windows was entrenched in the marketplace. In fact, cloud computing seems to be following the embedded operating system market where Linux is dominating. As cloud computing grows from its current infancy, I anticipate a rush of open source solutions becoming further entrenched with open source technology being the largest player when the "dust settles." Seeing companies like Facebook and VMware become active open source proponents in this market is as clear a sign as possible that open source is the way to go in cloud computing.

So, what do you think? Does Amazon have such a large lead that no one can catch them? Are all these companies panicking and trying to gain market share with "open source?"

If you need more details on the Facebook Open Compute project go here or for the VMware Cloud Foundry project go here.

• Cloud Computing
• Facebook
• Rackspace
• VMware