Book:Choosing and Implementing a Cloud-based Service for Your Laboratory/What is cloud computing?/The relationship between cloud computing and the open source paradigm

1.3 The relationship between cloud computing and the open source paradigm

Cloud computing is built on a wide array of technologies and utilities, including many built on the open source paradigm. According to the Open Source Initiative, open-source software, hardware, etc. is open-source not only because of its implied open access to how it's constructed (e.g., source code, schematics) but also for a number of other reasons^[1]:

It should be without restriction in how it is "distributed" or used within an aggregate software distribution of many components.
It should allow derivatives and modifications under the same terms as the original license, and that license should be portable with the derived or modified item.
It should permit distribution of software, hardware, etc. built from modified source code or schematics.
It should be without restriction in what person, organization, business, etc. is permitted to use it.
Its license should not place restrictions on other software or hardware schematics distributed with the original item.
Its license should not place technology-specific restriction on how the item is implemented.

Licenses vary widely from product to product, but broadly speaking, this all means if a commercial venture wants to run a significant chunk of its cloud operations on open-source technologies, it should be able to do so, as long as all license requirements are met. This same principle can be seen in early pushes for "open cloud," which emphasizes the need for "interoperability and portability across different clouds" through principles similar to the Open Source Initiative.^[2]

One need look no further than to Linux, a family of open-source operating systems, to discover how open-source solutions have gained prevalence in cloud computing and other enterprises. More than 95 percent of the top one million web domains are served up using Linux-based servers.^[3] In 2019, 96.3 percent of the top one billion enterprise business servers were running on Linux.^[4] And Canonical's open-source Ubuntu Linux distribution has garnered a growing reputation in cloud computing and other enterprise scenarios due to its focus on security.^[5]

In fact, Microsoft shifted its formerly anti-Linux stance in the mid-2010s to a stronger embrace of the open-source OS. In 2014, it began offering several Linux distributions in its Azure public cloud platform and infrastructure and announced it would make server-side .NET open-source, while also adding Linux support to its SQL Server and joining the Linux Foundation in 2016.^[6]^[7]^[8] Why the philosophy change? As Microsoft's Database Systems Manager Rohan Kumar put it in 2016: "In the messy, real world of enterprise IT, hybrid shops are the norm and customers don't need or want vendors to force their hands when it comes to operating systems. Serving these customers means giving them flexibility."^[6] That flexibility expanded to open sourcing SONiC, its network operating system, in 2017 and PowerShell, it's task automation and configuration tool, in 2018. Microsoft's Teams client was made available for Linux in 2019^[8], and other elements of Microsoft Windows continue to see increased compatibility with Linux distributions such as Ubuntu.^[9]

Others in Big Tech have also made contributions to open-source cloud-based technologies. Take for example Kubernetes, originally a Google project that eventually was open-sourced in 2014.^[10] The open-source container management tool soon after was donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) run by the Linux Foundation, "to help facilitate collaboration among developers and operators on common technologies for deploying cloud native applications and services."^[11] Since then, Kubernetes has become an integral part of many a cloud infrastructure due to its ability to provide lightweight, portable containerization—a complete runtime environment—to a bundle of applications run in the cloud. The software also manages resource scaling for applications, manages underlying infrastructure deployment, and allows for automatically mounting local and cloud storages.^[12] The open-source nature of the code also allows an organization's developers to review Kubernetes’ code to ensure it's meeting security policies and regulations, as well as make their own tweaks as needed.^[13] Writing for Hewlett Packard in 2020, entrepreneur Matt Sarrel estimated that some 70 to 85 percent of containerized applications are doing it on top of some version of Kubernetes.^[13]

Finally, other open-source software tools complement cloud computing efforts. For example, applications like Apache CloudStack, Cloudify, ManageIQ, and OpenStack put open-source cloud management in the hands of a cloud-ops team.^[14] Eucalyptus is "open-source software for building AWS-compatible private and hybrid clouds."^[15] Keylime is a security tool that allows users "to check for themselves that the cloud storing their data is as secure as the cloud computer owners say it is."^[16] Rook is a "cloud-native storage orchestrator" that provides a variety of storage management tools to allow cloud developers to "natively integrate with cloud-native environments."^[17] And the OpenStack project, with its collection of software components enabling cloud infrastructure, can't be forgotten.^[18] These and other open-source tools continue to drive how cloud computing is implemented, managed, and monitored, while highlighting the importance of the open source paradigm to cloud computing.