According to discerning IT industry insiders, open source tools are key to the future wellbeing of cloud computing initiatives, because they support common platforms that span the divide between public and private clouds.
As end-users and IT industry professionals are quickly coming to realise, one of the most relevant aspects of the development of cloud technologies is the convergence of private and public clouds.
The converged cloud - or hybrid cloud as it is better known - represents an emerging technology that's rapidly gaining traction in the marketplace. Organisations use the public cloud for data storage and archiving, but continue to maintain in-house, private cloud applications and infrastructures for operational activities.
Driving digital
It has been speculated that around 60% of all corporations will adopt hybrid cloud deployments by 2015 as the 'digital enterprise' initiative gains momentum.
Of all the open source tools available, the OpenStack cloud operating system appears to be the most promising. True to its open source roots, it's free. Its development is managed by the OpenStack Foundation, which claims to have attracted more than 7 000 members from 100 countries and 850 different organisations, secured more than US$10 million in funding, and is ready to "fulfil its mission to become the ubiquitous cloud computing platform".
OpenStack's history makes interesting reading. It was launched as a project in early 2010 by Rackspace Hosting - a US-based IT hosting company - and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the agency responsible for the US's civilian space programme and aerospace research.
The project's goal was to assist organisations to run cloud computing services on standard hardware. A year later, the developers of the Ubuntu Linux distribution platform decided to adopt OpenStack. Since then, more than 150 companies have joined the project, including AMD, Dell, IBM, Intel, VMware, and Yahoo.
From a technical perspective, OpenStack consists of a series of interrelated software development projects that control pools of processing, storage and networking resources throughout the data centre. They are managed through a dashboard which, while giving administrators overall control, allows users to provision resources independently through a Web interface.
Promising future
OpenStack's potential has been recognised by the Linux Foundation, the non-profit consortium dedicated to promoting standardisation and technical collaboration among opens standards protagonists around the world. In April this year, it announced the founding of the OpenDaylight project aimed at developing a new approach to SDN (software defined networking).
Unlike the SDN-linked OpenFlow technology, OpenDaylight has a sharper focus on application integration. Its mission is to facilitate a community-led, industry-supported open source framework, including code and architecture, to accelerate and advance a common, robust SDN platform.
Undoubtedly, OpenDaylight will help to fast track the development of new-generation technologies available to end-users and enable the widespread adoption of SDN going forward. Expect OpenDaylight to become a core component within future SDN architectures. The benefits will include reduced operational complexity, an extended life cycle for existing infrastructure hardware, and a boost for new services and capabilities as they materialise.
In addition to benefits for end-users, OpenDaylight - as an open source controller framework - will also be a boon for vendors and resellers as well as network and cloud service providers.
Around 60% of all corporations will adopt hybrid cloud deployments by 2015.
OpenDaylight (unlike OpenFlow) is capable of accommodating a wide range of implementations. This application-integration strategy supports the view proposed by visionary organisations that see the future of SDN being linked to service delivery, system orchestration and automation.
For users looking to invest in cloud computing, SDN and other emerging technologies, it's important to ascertain whether the chosen vendor's technology complies with OpenDaylight and other nascent OpenStack endeavours, as they will soon stabilise and provide tangible value to early adopters.
This was made clear at the recent OpenStack design summit (in April 2013) when more than a thousand developers, users, vendors and cloud-watchers gathered to discuss the latest trends in OpenStack and plans for the future.
OpenStack's latest code release - the seventh since it was founded and euphemistically dubbed the Grizzly release - addresses identity and access management, as well as providing support for multiple cloud platforms using OpenStack's management portal.
It's a clear indication of the maturity of the OpenStack software development process. And it's also a tribute to the efforts of more than 500 contributors who merged 7 620 patches with a host of new features geared to support production operations and greater integration with SDN and myriad other emerging enterprise technologies.
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