Cloud on Opensource

Nowadays cloud computing is a buzz word and becoming a popular model of IT service. Everyone talks about the benefits and the business agility of the enterprises those uses the services offered through cloud computing as opposed to the conventional in-house hosted applications. Generally we term the three famous ‘aaS’s (IaaS, PaaS and SaaS) collectively as cloud computing. The business model of all these three works in a similar manner. The user gets charged either based on their usage or based on monthly subscription. In either case the user need not bare the purchase and maintenance cost of the IT asset through which they enjoy the required service. Most of the analysts and architects believe that this model encourages the enterprises to adopt business changes faster and help to improve their business processes by leveraging these new Services. As we can see, the main attraction of this model is near to zero initial cost and ability to scale as required. Though it is in the early stage of evolution, most of the analysts are unanimously voting it as the next generation of IT service
All these days we have another strong business model named Open source model which evangelize the freedom to replicate and scale with out additional cost. Open source product vendors charge the users for their maintenance service and technical help rather than the license fee. Open source philosophy stand for the freedom of the user to use, modify and distribute his favorite software with out any copy right issue. This is indeed a good business model for the customers as they need not pay extra for initial setup and distributing it to other machines. More importantly there is no vender locking.
In the initial days most of the programs are single user based and hence a program implicitly means the executable as well as the data used by the program. But there is a paradigm shift once the networked services appeared in the horizon. A networked service, whether it could be a simple web application or a complex ERP process, the program runs on the server and the users ‘use’ the software through the permissible interfaces, most commonly a web browser.
The introduction of cloud computing increases this use and pay model. People like Richard Stallman and some of the open source philosophers went to the extreme of labeling the cloud computing as a sin and protest it for trapping the user to a vendor lock. Few other groups like O’Riley believe that this is a natural end of open source model. Open source is about enabling innovation and re-use, and at their best, cloud computing can be bent to serve those same aims. Though we may not be able predict the future, it is interesting to see if there is any common space where both these models can complement each other and converge for a better user experience. As we saw earlier, most of the cloud computing implementations are of initial stage and still lags lot of features and standards that hinder the enterprises to adopt this model. Most users worry about the safety of their critical data in the cloud environment. What happen to my data if the provider shut shop and run away? What happen to the program if the platform and/or the framework get changed? How can I change the provider if I am unhappy with the current one? I think we can answer these questions by applying the same open source philosophy.
First and foremost the adoption of open source platform stacks in a cloud computing implementation. This will not only allows to replicate the platform but also reduces the overall cost and hence the user fee. Google app engine is an example for this. They provides java and python based application framework for the users to develop their application and deploy on the cloud. Another available open source framework that helps to create cloud environment is EUCALYPTUS (Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs to Useful Systems). The current interface to EUCALYPTUS is compatible with Amazon's EC2 interface, but the infrastructure is designed to support multiple client-side interfaces. EUCALYPTUS is implemented using commonly-available Linux tools and basic Web-service technologies making it easy to install and maintain. This approach of abstracting and providing open interfaces to the user helps to have hassle free movement between the providers.
Ensuring the use of the AGPL license (GNU AFFERO GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE) which is designed specific to networked service ensures that a user of a particular service is allowed to get the source code of the software in a publicly assessable server. This reduces the fear of provider closing the shutters. Even in this case we can get the code and host the service somewhere else. But the data and other collaborating users/services still remain as problem. The main problem with data is the format which they store for the use of the program. By providing API, tools and open standard to retrieve data could minimize this issue. This is known as open knowledge. Such services can be classified as open software service. The definition of open knowledge is available at http://opendefinition.org/1.0. The open micro blogging site “http://identi.ca” has almost achieved the openness in code as well as in the knowledge. You can freely download the data and code from their server and set up your own service in case of requirement. Also it uses the open standards like open micro blogging protocol (http://openmicroblogging.org/) for and open ID for authentication. So it is easier to collaborate with other communities and avoids any vendor locking. The non profitable organization named Open cloud consortium (OCC) is a big step towards making open standards and frameworks for cloud computing.
We can see that cloud computing has borrowed from open source in terms of its governing principles, which could well be open source's lasting contribution to the cloud.