The JBGeorge Tech Blog

"Yes We're Open!"

C’mon – all the cool kids are doing it…

Going “open” that is.

How many announcements have we seen in the last few months having something to do with open technology when it comes to the cloud space?  With a great mix of business benefits AND customer / end user benefits, going open is certainly the latest trend.

I think this is a great and overdue market direction – standards are needed in this space, and I’m hopeful that this level of vendor response will help get us there.  Additionally, its important that we understand that open technology, while enabling users, should also benefit vendors, so that they can continue to invest in and support open products. 

Here’s a sampling of all the fantastic-ness.

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OpenStack

OpenStack

This one is near and dear to my heart since I’m the OpenStack business lead at Dell.  But my view is that OpenStack really kicked off this season’s “open” trend.  Announced last July, it’s an open source cloud platform that has gained serious momentum with over 60 vendors in the community and quite a few developers world wide.  With the latest release of their code base (codenamed Cactus), and their recent Design Summit (at the Hyatt Regency in Santa Clara – where else?), service providers and large enterprises are taking a serious look at OpenStack as a viable cloud solution.  (Learn more at www.OpenStack.org.  Also shameless plug for www.Dell.com/OpenStack.)

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http://www.OpenCompute.org

OpenCompute

Facebook helped launch this initiative as they strove to build a low cost, yet highly efficient computing infrastructure.  Partnering with other industry stalwarts like Dell and Rackspace, Facebook opened up the specs on the efficient servers that make up their environment, in an effort to encourage other companies to build energy efficient infrastructures.  (Learn more at www.opencompute.org.)

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http://www.CloudFoundry.com

VMware Cloud Foundry (Open PaaS)

With its aquisition of the SpringSource Java development framework, and of RabbitMQ, the cloud messaging technology, VMware makes a bold move into the cloud space by unveling Cloud Foundry as an open source “Platform as a Service”.   Focused on Java application developers , Cloud Foundry supports Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, and Rails, and allows developers a quick and easy way to get development platforms up and available. 

 Another plus – my good buddy Dave McCrory (@mccrory) is helping drive this initiative at VMware.  🙂  

(Learn more at www.cloudfoundry.com)

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openshift.redhat.com/app

OpenShift

Speaking of open PaaS, Red Hat announced its OpenShift Platform as a Service today.  Their focus is to produce exportable workloads that can be used via private cloud or public cloud, such as Amazon.  OpenShift will support Java, PHP, Python, and Ruby.  Ironically, the open source is not yet open source, but will be shortly.

(Learn more at openshift.redhat.com/app.)

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http://www.OpenFlow.org

OpenFlow

How can I continue without mentioning OpenFlow?  As many experts agree, the network will be one of the most critical components to cloud success.   Created to help drive innovation in networking, a number of vendors are investigating ways to add OpenFlow as a feature to their networking portfolio.   Dell, Nicira, and others are some interesting names in this space.  I’m hopeful we’ll hear some interesting news about commercial networking providers and OpenFlow as Interop kicks off next week.

(Learn more at www.openflow.org.)

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So what do you think should be next here?  Do you feel open sourcing cloud technologies advance us as an industry? 

Drop me a line or leave a comment – would love to hear your thoughts.

Until next time.

JOSEPH
@jbgeorge