Open source cloud computing platform is gaining momentum

As open source communities are active in innovation, open source products are poised to flourish in many market segments. Open source software is now becoming an important force in the field of cloud computing, as it has already laid a good foundation for desktop operating systems. Open source software still has a long way to go, and cloud computing seems to be the latest market potential to feel its profound impact.

The first wave in the open source ocean

A few years ago, startups started the first wave of open source cloud computing platforms, many of which are based on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) of public cloud computing. Let's take a look at some of the main Open-source cloud products.

Eucalyptus systems, a research project from the University of California in 2007, has been providing cloud computing technology since 2009. The Eucalyptus cloud computing platform includes virtualized IT infrastructures to create cloud computing resources for computing, networking, and storage purposes.

Chris Pinkham and Willem van Biljon, once a member of Amazon's cloud computing team, founded Nimbula in 2009 with the support of the Venture fund, which has also become another well-known company in the open source cloud computing market. The company has developed a cloud computing operating system that integrates the scalability and operational efficiencies of public cloud computing with the reliability, security, and credibility of enterprise data centers.

This approach can be very good for some types of enterprises to provide services.

"The AWS Open source solution meets the needs of the small business, but most companies are looking for more complex solutions for their private cloud computing," said Jay Lyman, an analyst at the 451 Research Center enterprise software group. Many alternative products have emerged.

Cloud computing platform products become the pioneer of open source cloud computing products

Citrix Systems acquired Cloud.com in July 2011, which introduced a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) designed to help enterprises and cloud computing providers deploy and manage scalable, secure, and open cloud computing services. In the end, Citrix moved the Cloudplatform API control to Apache Foundation under the Apache License 2.0 version.

Cloudplatform out of a different way from other companies and other models. Iswest is a regional Internet service provider (ISP) located near Los Angeles, starting in 1996 to provide dial-up Internet services and to provide a variety of network services and supporting application solutions, such as e-mail hosting.

October 2010, Iswest plans to provide private network services. The company evaluates a range of cloud computing solutions, including Cloudplatform, Eucalyptus, Enomaly (a traditional dedicated cloud computing stack solution provider) and Opennebula.

There are many reasons for Iswest to choose Cloudplatform. "Most cloud computing solutions focus first on the computing layer, followed by the network layer," explains Clayton Weise, Iswest's engineering director. "Cloudplatform is relatively good at supporting different network choices, and that's where we're most interested." "Cloudplatform also supports multiple virtual machine management programs, including KVM (core based virtual machines), Citrix XenServer, and VMware company vsphere.

The Internet service provider introduced the technology in July 2011 and gained a lot from it. With these changes, Iswest has achieved a higher computational resource density on its computing infrastructure and increased revenue per unit area of its data center. Previously, a managed customer represented an average monthly income of 1,200 to 1,800 dollars per rack, and now the monthly income of the unit cloud computing racks reached 90,000 to 120,000 dollars.

As a result, the average profit margin was achieved from 35% to 85% growth. The Iswest company's hardware purchase investment return cycle has fallen from 12 months to even two months. In addition, the company's services are particularly appealing to customers because their costs are reduced by 20%.

Development of OpenStack resource pool

Since the inception of the OpenStack project in 2010, the project has been the focus of many enterprises and promote. OpenStack, a customer Inkiru company based in Palo Alto, Calif., uses the open source cloud computing platform and its implementation market analysis platform. Its products allow corporate users to assess new customer behavior, increase target focus and conversion rates, optimize e-mail advertising, reduce cost and increase approval rates.

Initially, Inkiru relied on AWS to support its business, but when financial services providers showed interest in their services, it needed a more sophisticated system.

"Financial services customers need a single tenant server that can pass stringent security audits," explains Vijay Raghavendra, chief technology officer at Inkiru. When the dedicated machine meets the needs of the market environment, Inkiru wants to apply cloud computing to the company's data scientists to build their real-time predictive models and transfer the entire system to AWS or single tenant cloud computing infrastructure.

The company has studied a variety of cloud computing products, including Cloudplatform and OpenStack based Rackspace private cloud computing. In November 2012, Inkiru Company chose Rackspace for many factors. First, the system can be run on any hardware configuration. Second, it supports building a security sandbox and isolating the customer's system, which is a significant factor in data security. Since November, Inkiru has been working with an industry-leading financial services organization to develop market analysis products.

Open source cloud computing products Aggressive

With the development of open source product market, everything has changed. For a long time, these technologies have been seen as Low-cost and, in many cases, free. However, as commercial open source products continue to be developed, the price gap has ceased to exist. "The cost of an open-source system is often the same as a proprietary product," said Gary Chen, a software research manager at IDC's cloud computing and virtualization systems.

Long ago, open source technology has been criticized for its support, but the recent restrictions have ceased to exist. "such as Red Hat and other companies offer support services comparable to commercial solution providers," says Lyman of the 451 Research Center.

A notable difference between open source and proprietary products is that customers want to be able to customize the software to make it work. "Since we are a provider of it technology solutions, our corporate culture advocates that our program members carefully study the source code so that the source code can be used for me," Inkiru company Raghavendra said. "However, if an enterprise lacks this cultural atmosphere and technical ability, then they will find that using an open source system is quite cumbersome." ”