One thing I look at for when looking at cloud computing services and Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings is how I could apply their features to applications I’ve developed in the past. This gives me a good guide for the types of architectures I’m likely to work with in the future. Most of the [...]
Read More »The vast majority of enterprises use open source software as a significant and growing part of their IT portfolio. And most enterprises work with one or more open source vendors to get commercial grade open source support for the open source software they use. In order to select the right open source vendors, it’s important to understand their business model and how that model impacts you.
The four most common types of open source support models and the implications for enterprises:
Open source literally is a gold mine for enterprises in 2012+ and as the amount of choices increase exponentially so does the need for a provisioning strategy.
Webster’s basic definition for provisioning is to supply someone or something with provisions. Thanks Webster, I can always count on you to cut to the chase. Since we are not really writing about supplying food, water or clothing rations I had to find a more appropriate and up to date definition.
This one from webopedia describes provisioning as: The process of providing users with access to data and technology resources. The term typically is used in reference to enterprise-level resource management.
That’s pretty good, but lets dig a bit further into the nature of open source to consider the implications of effectively and safely provisioning it for an enterprise. Three of the largest open source repositories in the world publish the following data about the amount of code available:
Read More »Deploying enterprise cloud apps to public or remote cloud infrastructure provides a lot of useful benefits, but can be problematic for many organizations due to concerns over security and control. Once you are ready for the move from your warm and windowless data center to someone else’s warm and windowless data center, here are 5 keys to being successful.
1) Protect your data (part 1)
Cloud security is the number one issue with using public clouds. Many organizations are building applications that include personal information, confidential information, or intellectual property that needs to be protected. Help all the paranoids sleep better by building in security features from the start, even going to the point of overkill if necessary. Database encryption is a common way to protect data at rest, but also consider treating your cloud instances as single use servers. Remove all the keys and passwords from disk once your application is running and disable all unnecessary connections including ssh. Adopt a devops strategy that allows quick launches and centralized logging and management. If a server does stop responding or gets rebooted for some reason, just throw it away and get a new one. Taking a few extreme security measures will help you get more opportunities to utilize the true power of the cloud.
2) Protect your data (part 2)
Cloud technology does pose some new challenges. At this point, server failure rates can vary and the faster options include storage that does not persist across restarts or failures. Data loss is a real risk unless a high availability or replication strategy is adopted. There are also plenty of cloud based data solutions popping up, including Cloudant, Amazon RDS, and Rackspace MySQL Cloud, that can put the HA burden on someone else’s shoulders. Bottom line, losing data will kill a project fast. Keep it safe.
Read More »Crossing the Chasm, by Geoffrey A. Moore, was not written about Cloud Technology. In fact, the book was originally published in 1991 when a reference to “The Cloud” most probably would have had people looking out their windows at the sky.
Cloud technology and cloud based solutions are having an impact on all stages of the current technology adoption life cycle, and although the book was published in 1991, the principles and characteristics defined appear to be solution agnostic and still resonate 20 years later with recent references in articles like, 5 More Books for the Aspiring Funnelholic, Crossing the Content Chasm, and Will Google+ Cross the Chasm?.
So what exactly are the stages of the technology adoption life cycle, and where do you stand when it comes to cloud solutions?
Read More »SOPA and PIPA were very recently put on hold after much protesting and petitioning from the likes of Wikipedia, Google, the Free Software Foundation, and angry Internet surfers everywhere – but you can bet this isn’t the last we’ve heard of bills such as these. So what would similar bills mean to open source software if they were realized? Here’s what the potential impact could look like.
Read More »Open source benefits to businesses are pretty obvious, even if only recently recognized. It costs less, and often works better, than its commercial competitors. Developers have long preferred open source products to their commercial counterparts. In fact, this developer preference is why we are seeing the surge in enterprise open source usage. Why do developers prefer open source so strongly?
I want it yesterday!
Developers want to get stuff done. The thought of engaging in a procurement process is enough to sap the energy from almost any idea. We will just go back to reading hacker news instead of slogging our way through all that red tape.
Open source tools, on the other hand, are always close at hand. It takes almost no time from conception to actually writing code if you are using open source tools. Even better you can wait until you have something interesting to demo before you ask for forgiveness. With commercial offerings you almost always have to ask for permission, and we all know that is a sure fire way to get your pet project shut down.
Read More »Although it may be easy to identify the open source projects that widely used, uncovering the hot new projects that enterprises should be evaluating can be more challenging. OpenLogic’s Open Source Trending report analyzes which open source projects are growing the most quickly in enterprise interest and adoption during the past year. With this information, you can keep an eye on the trends that may be coming to your enterprise in the year ahead.
OpenLogic analyzed 8 growth metrics for 16 projects in three categories — web and application servers; application frameworks; and databases and big data. The projects were stack ranked on each metric and across all metrics to create an overall growth ranking.
Read More »Pre-paying for open source software technical support and consultative expertise might sound crazy to some of our readers, but it should sound like a very smart and safe business decision. As an industry indicator of the growing need for commercial support on open source software OpenLogic’s support team saw a 39% increase from 2010 t0 2011 in the total number of support incidents submitted during the last calendar year.
I have the pleasure of working with many different client organizations to help them determine if, when and what service level of commercial open source support is right for them. Every time we discuss the options our conversation is a little different from the last, and rightfully so. Evaluating the organizational need for open source technical support depends significantly on where, how, why and when the open source is going to be used. These considerations all most likely revolve around some amount of a formalized open source strategy or open source software policy.
Just about anyone these days will echo the comment, “Nothing is ever really, truly free anymore.” If you agree with this statement to some extent, the rest of this article will summarize a few key reasons why OpenLogic’s enterprise customers purchase (and continue to renew) a subscription for pre-paid support and/or consulting.
Read More »Cloud technology is the next step in the evolution of predictable software engineering processes. With the cloud, servers become instant-on commodities. They are built the same way every time, providing consistency from the ground up. Servers instances are cheap and easy allowing each component of an application to be isolated to minimize conflicts. Instances are disposable, so there is no longer a need to worry about server drift. Just get a new one every time.
We can follow several recent advancements in software engineering processes that have been building on each other to see how this all fits together.
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