Cloud computing introduced the enterprise previously unheard-of levels of scalability, flexibility and cost-efficiency, but it also brought with it a whole new perspective to data management. Alongside a restructured operating model which combines infrastructure with information-centric business rules, security as well as other aspects, there’s the task of setting up proper management architecture.
Applicable management architecture for the enterprise cloud requires a great deal of automation, which solution providers have been quite successful in delivering so far, as well as resource accessibility. This latter is normally achieved via a particularly large bundle of APIs, and comes alongside the first requirement and benefit of open-source cloud management.
Vendor lock-in is a situation every enterprise would prefer to avoid. The broad adoption of heterogeneous multivendor environments the cloud brought with it was accompanied by the need to manage data across every environment within it. This requires open source technology, which simplifies and makes it more efficient to develop, integrate and deploy applications in the cloud.
Compatibly is the first benefit of open-source cloud/data management, with the second benefit being quite obvious – cost efficiency. Proprietary software licenses can take up a sizable chunk of an enterprise IT budget, especially as these can be replaced by open-source alternatives, capable of deploying in a commercial enterprise scale. This level of open-source cost-efficiency also provides a given enterprise much more flexibility, since it
doesn’t have to become heavily invested and thus locked in with a proprietary offering on the long run.
Thus far we’ve come to know the benefits of open-source cloud management, and they’re making strides in practice as well. Puppet Labs, an open source system management solutions vendor announced it’s extending its offerings portfolio to include an enterprise edition of its flagship product appropriately named ‘Puppet’. This is a major development for Puppet Labs considering that it’s now up against HP, IBM and other industry leaders. CEO Luke Kanies noted in an interview the product has not become open-core, meaning that the open-source aspect of the product will probably not be compromised in favor of the commercial side any time soon.
To top one major update, Puppet Labs made one bigger leap for open-source cloud management a few days ago, when the company announced the NICS is now utilizing Puppet as its management solution. The National Institute for Computational Science is an academic project which features one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world dubbed Kraken.
Open-source cloud management is a very active segment in the enterprise as well as the academic level, but it also reaches closer to the consumer end. ReadWriteWeb reports that Apple had joined the Hadoop user base, after it posted a second job listing shedding some light on its use of the open-source management solution. Apple evidently utilizes the solution in its iAds system as well as for improving iOS user experience, which is no wonder considering Hadoop’s benefits. The open-source framework’s advantageousness lies in its capacity to process Big Data in clusters; an approach
which handles requests much faster than commercial alternatives.
Data management drastically transformed as traditional IT infrastructure was replaced by virtualization, and as the cloud grows ever-more scalable and powerful so will the necessity for equally efficient management solutions. Proprietary software is not going to be replaced by open-source any time soon, but the latter seems to be on the right track to significantly boost its hold of the enteprise market.
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