linuxian: Cloud

As we prepared to announce our LinuxCon schedule this week, I talked to one of our keynote speakers, Eucalyptus Systems CEO Marten Mickos. Eucalyptus was one of the first companies on the cloud computing scene and Mickos is among the most respected open source entrepreneurs in the industry (having been CEO of MySQL AB before its acquisition by Sun Microsystems).

Mickos took a few minutes to share his thoughts on cloud computing and Linux, the new Open Virtualization Alliance, and how Linux has shaped our lives over the last 20 years.

I've heard people make the case recently that without Linux, cloud computing would not exist or would still be in the distant future. How has Linux enabled cloud computing, and why is it (Linux) so important for the future of the new enterprise environment?

Mickos: There are many reasons for this. Importantly, Linux became the dominant platform for all things web, so it's natural that Linux continues to be the foundation for the next paradigm: the cloud.

On a more technical note, Linux is an operating system built for scale-out (rather than scale-up). In previous software architectures, scale-up was the dominant design. But in a cloud world, everything has to scale out. That's why Linux is a perfect fit for cloud.

There are other reasons too: the world of software is increasingly flat. Anyone and everyone can participate and contribute. As the leading open source operating system, Linux is the natural magnet for such crowd creativity. That's why Linux evolves faster than other operating system.

Finally, it certainly helps that many of the key technologies needed in a cloud environment are open source products that run well with Linux. To name just a few: KVM, Puppet, Mule, Spring, Hadoop, MySQL and Eucalyptus.

As an early company to the now crowded cloud computing space, what is Eucalyptus doing today to help Linux enterprise and mobile users?

Mickos: You are right that Eucalyptus was among the early pioneers when the project started as an NSF-funded research project in 2007 at UC Santa Barbara. We early on decided to focus on enterprise and mobile users. From a technical standpoint, we chose the GPL license and we wrote the product in Java for highly-scalable, mission-critical use.

The product goes through extensive QA in our own internal cloud, and it's packaged and ready for people to download and put in production. In the past year, we have seen more than 25,000 new Eucalyptus clouds start up all over the world. It's great to know that we are being useful to students, researchers, developers and businesses!

We innovate fast and add new features to the product that our users are requesting. You can see the features of our upcoming release 3.

Because we are fully compatible with the cloud API of Amazon Web Services, you can move any AWS application onto Eucalyptus. Additionally, we make sure we have a strong ecosystem of partners with products that work well with Eucalyptus. This is what enables users of all types to quickly get going with their various cloud projects.

Can you tell us more about the new Open Virtualization Alliance? Why is Eucalyptus investing here, and what do you hope comes from the efforts?

Mickos: KVM is a powerful hypervisor with a great future. The fact that it is embedded in the Linux kernel makes it the obvious choice for Linux-based cloud deployments. Eucalyptus supports all major hypervisors, but we have a natural affinity to the ones under an open source license. In the Open Virtualization Alliance we get to participate in important work on performance enhancements on KVM in general and the KVM-Eucalyptus combination in particular. We share with our users a passion for software that runs fast and scales well.

So, can you give us a sneak peek into what we should expect from your LinuxCon keynote in August?

Mickos: I will talk about the shift of software infrastructure to the cloud paradigm, and about the implications this will have on free and open source software. I happen to believe that the shift to cloud is bigger than the shift to the Internet was fifteen years ago. Nearly all aspects of the software stack are in for a big disruption.

This August also marks the 20th anniversary of Linux. What do you think is the most interesting or important impact Linux has had on the world of technology?

Mickos: You know, I think Linux's most important impact is societal. Linus (Linus Torvalds in Pictures) showed all people on this planet that open collaboration leads to superior results. We need more openness, more transparency and more collaboration in this world. Thanks to Linux, it is happening. We see other areas of society learn from the world of free and open source software. The current big social trend on the mobile web has (perhaps unknowingly) borrowed many characteristic from the Linux project.

That said, Linux has had and continues to have a profound impact on the specific world of technology. There isn't a car or a medical device or a computer that doesn't run some sort of open source software today. Every leading web or mobile service uses open source software. Linux wasn't the first and isn't the only one, but it is the standard bearer of this amazing movement.

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Jumat, 24 Juni 2011

Cloud Adoption Survey Says Linux is OS of Choice

Cloud.com, BitRock, and Zenoss have surveyed more than 500 members of the open source and systems management community about trends in cloud computing and users' preferences and plans. The result? There's a strong correlation between open source and cloud usage — and the survey found that Linux looms large in plans for deployments.

The survey was taken by 521 IT professionals in a broad variety of institutions, with 9% working for public companies, 51% working for private / privately-held companies, 11% working in educational institutions, 5% in government, and 4% at non-profits. The respondents range from CTOs (11%), IT managers (18%), to technical support (7%) and developers (12%).

Planning for cloud infrastructure varies widely, with only 7% having an "approved cloud computing strategy," and 20% with "no plans to develop" a cloud computing strategy. About 44% of the respondents have at least a partial or fully developed strategy for cloud computing and — good news for the marketing folks — 32% are still gathering input for their 2011 cloud computing strategy. (Though the survey was run earlier this year, so it may well be that the ones gathering input earlier in the year are now finished.)

Now that we have a profile of the people responding, let's take a look at the results. One of the most interesting, here at Linux.com at least, is the OS that respondents plan to run. Overwhelmingly, Linux was on the shopping list for 83% of the respondents — compared to 66% for Windows, 8% looking to BSD, only 5% for Solaris, and 12% choosing "other." Naturally, many shops are looking at mixed deployments to satisfy needs for applications that run only on Linux or Windows, but it's clear from the survey that Linux is doing quite well.

Not just Linux, of course, open source is doing quite well too. Most organizations (69%) plan to use open source "whenever possible," and only 3% of the organizations are against using open source in the cloud.

What do organizations want to do with all this open cloud Linux-based goodness? Right now there's a fairly even mix of plans to use cloud computing for compute (59%), storage (51%), or Platform as a Service (Paas) with 47%.

Application choice for the cloud shows strong interest in content management and Web publishing (57%), document management (39%), and network monitoring and management (34%). See Figure 1 for the chart of results.

The majority of organizations want to run cloud computing on their own hardware, with 57% of the respondents wanting to use their own hardware and facilities. Only 18% wanted to use dedicated hardware at a managed service provider, and 23% of the organizations want to use their own hardware at a service provider using a shared infrastructure.

Why are organizations turning to cloud computing? The reasons are varied, and most organizations have a number of reasons for wanting to use cloud computing. The top reason, at 61%, is scalability. Scalability is followed closely by cost savings (54%), and ease of management (53%).

My favorite reason, redundancy, came in fourth with only 49% of respondents. Greater flexibility also came in at 49%, and elasticity was right there with 48%. It's a bit surprising that elasticity isn't higher on the list, given that scalability features so highly. You'd think that the two go hand-in-hand, with a need to meet fluctuating demand. See Figure 2 for the full results.

The organizations also have some notions about what the cloud is good for. Though only 54% listed cost savings as a reason for cloud computing, 68% believe it will save on hardware costs, and 66% believe it will be faster to deploy infrastructure. And 57% say that it will reduce the burden of systems management. Though less than half of the respondents cite elasticity as a reason for choosing the cloud, 51% say that elasticity is a benefit of cloud computing.

It doesn't look like most of the organizations are depending too heavily on cloud computing just yet. Many of the organizations (61%) plan to use the cloud for development and testing. Far behind development comes Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), with 37% of the organizations planning to use the cloud to offer SaaS. Note that doesn't measure the companies that want to use SaaS that's hosted in the cloud. A third (33%) of the organizations want to use cloud computing to mimic public cloud services behind their firewall, and just 27% want to use cloud computing for High Performance Computing (HPC).

Cloud computing does have some hurdles to overcome. A lot of respondents are worried about the security of the cloud, and inertia (otherwise known as a "conservative IT strategy") is in the way for 30% of organizations. The lead inhibitor, though, is training — 43% of organizations see a lack of cloud training as a problem for deploying cloud computing.

It's also worth noting that regulatory compliance is cited by more than 20% of the organizations. That's worth paying attention to for those companies supplying solutions related to cloud computing. No doubt regulatory compliance features highly on the list of the 9% of public companies that are mulling cloud computing.

Security is also seen as a challenge for management in the cloud with 36% of users saying that security is a headache, while only 12% cited said that performance management is a problem. Configuring guest instances is only a challenge for 10% of the users, and provisioning Linux instances came in dead last at 7%.

Finally, a whopping 53% say that their existing systems management tools do not translate well for managing their cloud computing environment. Something to pay attention to for systems management vendors.

If you're hoping to make use of the survey in your own work, note that the survey results are provided under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) license.

The bottom line? It looks like cloud computing is following a typical adoption pattern. Organizations are finding out what cloud computing is food for, and not. Naturally, Linux is featuring significantly in most organizations plans for cloud computing — as is open source software.

Does this fit your expectations? Tell us in the comments how your organization is using Linux and cloud computing!

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Jumat, 03 Juni 2011

The Future of the OpenStack Open Source Cloud

From the blogs: Jonathan Bryce explains why Ubuntu Linux is used by OpenStack and why OpenStack is a once-in-a-lifetime open source opportunity.

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Kamis, 26 Mei 2011

Future of Open Source Survey Points to Cloud and Mobile Opportunities

The annual Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), sponsored by Computerworld, is underway in San Francisco this week, and, as usual at the conference, Northbridge Venture Partners has released its Future of Open Source survey results. This year's edition of the survey involved more than 20 industry collaborators and more than 450 participants from all over the open source community. We've covered the results of this survey in the past, where it has typically pointed to important new trends such as the integration of open source with cloud computing strategies, and the rise of open source business intelligence software. This year's survey results show especially bright trends for open source in the mobile and cloud computing arenas.

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