By Thor Olavsrud
In
the 25 years since Richard Stallman wrote the GNU General Public
License, free and open source software (FOSS) have become pervasive in
computing: Linux, Apache HTTP Server, MySQL and more can be found in
large numbers of enterprises across the globe. And open source is now
increasingly undergirding cloud computing as well.
"Open source is certainly at the foundation in terms of building
out cloud technologies," says Byran Che, senior director of product
management at Red Hat and responsible for its cloud operations
offerings, management software and Red Hat Enterprise MRG, (Red Hat's
Messaging, Real-time and Grid platform). "If you take a look at market
share in the server space, as you look at traditional data centers,
about 70 percent are running on the Windows platform and about 30
percent are running Linux. As you take a look at what operating systems
people are choosing to build applications on in the cloud, the ratio
flips completely."
The reasoning is simple, Che says: With a fresh start, you get to
build a whole new architecture from the ground up, and open source gives
you the best value.
"You can't get to the Amazon scale or the Google scale and pay the license fees," he says.
Cost isn't the only thing giving the open source model an edge in
the cloud space. Che also points to the capability to create a community
around a project and thus drive rapid innovation.
"That's what open source is really good at," he says. "Amazon,
Google, Facebook, all the people building out all these cloud
applications, infrastructure and services, they're all doing it on open
source. The fact that they're using open source software is the only way
they can innovate at the pace they need to. They can't wait for their
vendors to go through the development cycle."
Does SaaS Violate Free Software Principles
But what exactly is open source doing in the cloud? Stallman, for
whom free software is intensely political (he disdains the term open
source), claims that cloud computing--specifically Software as a Service
(SaaS)--cannot be free by definition.
"SaaS and proprietary software lead to similar harmful results, but the causal mechanisms are different," Stallman wrote in an
article
published by the Boston Review in 2010. "With proprietary software, the
cause is that you have and use a copy which is difficult or illegal to
change. With SaaS, the cause is that you use a copy you don't have."
"Many free software supporters assume that the problem of SaaS will
be solved by developing free software for servers," he adds. "For the
server operator's sake, the programs on the server had better be free;
if they are proprietary, their owners have power over the server. That's
unfair to the operator, and doesn't help you at all. But if the
programs on the server are free, that doesn't protect you as the
server's user from the effects of SaaS. They give freedom to the
operator, but not to you."
Stallman's contention has its roots in the philosophical divide
between free software and open source software. The open source
movement, Stallman says, is a development methodology with a practical
focus on making the source code available. The free software movement,
on the other hand, promotes an ethical stance on how users should be
able to interact with their software.
For Stallman, free software must provide users with four essential freedoms:
1. The freedom to run the program as you wish
2. The freedom to study and change the source code so it does what you wish
3. The freedom to redistribute exact copies
4. The freedom to redistribute copies of your modified versions
While the open source definition and the free software definition
are nearly identical, they seem to come apart at the seams when it comes
to cloud.
"Releasing the server software source code does benefit the
community: Suitably skilled users can set up similar servers, perhaps
changing the software," Stallman wrote. "But none of these servers would
give you control over computing you do on it, unless it's your server.
The rest would all be SaaS. SaaS always subjects you to the power of the
server operator, and the only remedy is, Don't use SaaS!. Don't use
someone else's server to do your own computing on data provided by you."
Meanwhile, the open source world is working feverishly across the
cloud stack--Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service
(PaaS), SaaS, Data Storage as a Service (DaaS)--and in cloud management.
The Properties of Open Cloud
Che says Red Hat believes in the open cloud, which he says has seven defining properties:
1. It's open source. "That's the foundation upon which you build," Che says.
2. It's based on collaborative development. "There's got to be a
viable, independent community around the project," he says. "That
dynamic has to be there, otherwise it's just a proprietary company
releasing its source code."
3. It's based on open standards and open formats that are not tied into proprietary technology.
4. It gives you the freedom to use your intellectual property.
5. It gives users a choice of infrastructure. They get to choose their infrastructure provider and cloud provider.
6. It has open APIs. "It's got to be pluggable and extensible," Che
says. "It can't be restricted by what you got out of the box."
7. It has to be portable to other clouds. It can't lock you in to a particular vendor.
"One of the areas where we need an open cloud is to give you the
ability to have interoperability and portability across different
clouds," Che says. "I should be able to manage a hybrid cloud that spans
across all these different technologies."
Open Source Cloud to Avoid Vendor Lock-in
One big step in that interoperability and portability direction is
Apache Deltacloud,
a project initiated by Red Hat in 2009 and then contributed to the
Apache Software Foundation, where it gained Top-Level Project (TLP)
status in 2010. With Deltacloud, the Apache Software Foundation is
attempting to provide an answer to a problem that hasn't much reared its
head yet, but is likely to become pressing in coming years: cloud
lock-in.
"The biggest challenge is that there's so much happening in the
cloud that users are so busy figuring out how best to use cloud that
lock-in is still not a big concern for them," says David Lutterkort,
principal software engineer at Red Hat and chair of the Apache
Deltacloud project. "It's not that high on peoples' lists yet."
Deltacloud is an API that abstracts differences between clouds,
enabling management of resources in different IaaS clouds using a single
API. It can essentially be implemented as a wrapper around a large
number of clouds, freeing users of cloud computing from dealing with the
particulars of each cloud's API.
Standards bodies have also coalesced to create open and
interoperable standards. In 2009, leading standards development
organizations (SDOs) to form
Cloud Standards Coordination,
intended to coordinate the work of the various SDOs developing cloud
standards. Members include the Cloud Security Alliance, Cloud Standards
Customer Council, Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), the European
Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), the National Institute
of Standards and Technology (NIST), Open Grid Forum (OGF), Object
Management Group (OMG), Open Cloud Consortium (OCC), Organization for
the Advancement of Structured Information and Standards (OASIS), Storage
Networking Industry Association (SNIA), The Open Group, Association for
Retail Technology Standards (ARTS) and TM Forum.
Lutterkort is also a board member of the DMTF, which, among other
things, is working on a standard called the Cloud Infrastructure
Management Interface (CIMI), which would create a standard API that any
cloud could use.
Project Aeolus
is another forward-looking open source project, driven by Red Hat, that
essentially seeks to build an open source cloud broker. A stand-alone
project, Aeolus offers a single, consistent set of tools to build and
manage organized groups of virtual machines across clouds. It consists
of the following:
- Aeolus Conductor, which offers a way to provide cloud resources to
users, manage users' access to and use of those resources and control
users' instances in clouds
- Aeolus Composer, which provides a way to build cloud-specific images
from generic templates so users can choose clouds freely using
compatible images
- Aeolus Orchestrator, which provides a way to manage clumps of
instances in an organized way, giving users the ability to automatically
bring up a set of different instances on a single cloud or spanning
multiple clouds, configure them and tell them about each other
- Aeolus HA Manager, which provides a way to make instances or clumps of instances in the cloud highly available
Red Hat is far from alone in contributing to the open cloud.
Rackspace Cloud and NASA have made waves with the OpenStack IaaS cloud
computing project, also made available through the Apache Software
Foundation. The OpenStack project's mission is to give any organization
the capability to create and offer cloud computing services running on
standard hardware.
Thor Olavsrud is a senior writer for
CIO.com.
