The Enterprise Open Source Blog

The 5 Key Features of an Enterprise Cloud

Posted by Rod Cope on January 9th, 2012 in The Cloud

Everybody wants an “Enterprise Cloud” these days, even if they work for a smaller business, but what exactly does that mean? What is an enterprise cloud solution?

Here’s a list of 5 key features to look for in a cloud solution that will help you decide if it’s enterprise ready:

Choice

Description: In the enterprise, there is never a one-size-fits-all solution. For any problem. Ever. This is why nearly every large enterprise has one of everything. They have applications running on multiple databases, operating systems, and programming languages. Their developers run many different IDE’s. There’s no reason to think the cloud space will be any different.

Tip: The enterprise cloud solution you choose must support multiple deployment clouds, both public and private, as well as multiple programming languages, components, and stacks. The one true deployment stack, programming language, or cloud today will only be one of several in a few years. Embrace this diversity and use the right tool for each job.

Top 3 Reasons Why Open PaaS Rocks

Posted by Rod Cope on December 7th, 2011 in Open Source Trends, The Cloud

So, why does Open PaaS rock? I’ll tell you, but first a little background.

As of today, a quick search of OLEX, Github, and SourceForge shows a total of 4,028 cloud-related open source projects in the world. Google Code shows 163 million results when searching for “cloud”. That’s a whole lot of cloudy open source.

Open source is ubiquitous and the cloud is ubiquitous, so it’s not surprising that there’s a lot of open source in the cloud (most public clouds are built on components such as Xen) and a lot of cloud in open source (projects like fog and OpenStack). In this context, it makes sense that there are a number of providers talking about “Open PaaS”, a marriage of open source and the cloud that allows developers to rapidly deploy their applications in a cloud while avoiding restrictions related to proprietary vendor licenses and the like.

How Open is Open? A PaaS Scorecard

Posted by Rod Cope on July 27th, 2011 in The Cloud

In this post, we attempt to define and score key criteria that should be used to measure and assess how well a particular Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering meets the standard of “open”.

We examined five PaaS platforms: Cloud Foundry (from VMWare), DotCloud, Force.com, Google App Engine and OpenShift (from RedHat). We scored each against five criteria for openness: choice of infrastructure, choice of platform, portability, choice of support and open source licensing.

Open Source and Software Allergies

Posted by Rod Cope on September 13th, 2010 in Scanning & Provisioning

One of the reasons they put ingredient labels on food is so you can make sure you won’t eat something that might kill you. Why don’t we do the same thing with software?

Clouds and the Evolution of Open Source Software

Posted by Rod Cope on September 8th, 2010 in The Cloud

One impact Cloud will have on open source is that it’s a new niche to be filled with a new ecosystem of OSS projects. Over the last 10 years, especially, whenever a new sandbox appears, it creates a flood of new projects. Think web servers, web development frameworks, app servers, NoSQL databases, map/reduce, virtualization, mobile, and now cloud.

Tyranny of Choice in the Cloud

Posted by Rod Cope on August 26th, 2010 in The Cloud

There are now so many options when deploying to the cloud, enterprises are being faced with a Tyranny of Choice.

Open Source and Usability

Posted by Rod Cope on June 10th, 2008 in Open Source Trends

Paula Bach over on Port 25 talked about how to go hybrid yesterday, but she's not talking about cars. She's talking about how proprietary companies are borrowing techniques from the open source community and how certain successful communities are going commercial. For me, the interesting part is that she specifically calls out usability as an area where open [...]

Is it too easy to install open source packages?

Posted by Rod Cope on May 30th, 2008 in Open Source Trends

As Abhijit Nadgouda says in "Benefits of Online Repositories", it only takes a simple command or two in Linux to download and install or upgrade a package. If necessary, even dependencies will be downloaded and installed and you don't have to know anything about these new packages to make it all work in a matter [...]

JavaOne 2008 Recap

Posted by Rod Cope on May 20th, 2008 in Open Source Trends

This year at JavaOne was the first time since 1999 that I actually got to attend a bunch of sessions, thanks to not having to man an OpenLogic booth.  Overall, it was quite good.  There were quite a few parallel tracks and always something interesting in at least one of them. Perhaps unsurprising, but the [...]

Ruby and Microsoft

Posted by Rod Cope on April 23rd, 2008 in Open Source Trends

Microsoft just held their 2008 "MVP Global Summit" in Redmond last week.  This is an internal conference where they recognize awardees in a number of divisions and have over 400 technical sessions on a variety of topics. The interesting bit for me is that Jamie Cannon reports that there's an informal meeting of Microsoft Rubyists [...]