Open Source and Workload Automation

The success of open source

“Every company is a software company” says Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft. This is evident when you look at the size of organizations’ software development teams. Amadeus IT Group, a global leader in the travel industry, has a development team of 5,000+ developers. Goldman Sachs has an army of 11,000 engineers and programmers. It’s no longer just about purchasing and deploying software. Digital organizations today are aiming at differentiating themselves through software that meets company-specific requirements.

In this development-driven market, open source is emerging as the new normal in enterprise software. After some initial skepticism, open source is now widespread, and it is adopted to support mission-critical business processes and is largely embedded within commercial products. Right now, you are likely running more open source than you might think.

Reasons for adoption include:

• Control – open source can be modified for any specific organizational need, enhanced and shared in a collaborative community.
• Agility – open source code promotes the principles of agile methodology: open collaboration, transparency, streamlined process, frequent delivery, immediate feedback. Therefore, it can be easily changed at the speed that the business requires.
• Collaboration / Longevity – unlike custom applications, whose life cycle depends entirely on internal skill-set and terminates when the skill-set departs the organization, open source life cycle is determined by the ecosystem around it, and when the ecosystem is successful, it can last very long and evolve quickly.

However, cost is still cited as one of the most significant benefits to adopting open source. But the open source software cost, exactly like the commercial software cost, is much more than just the initial licensing cost. When considering costs, you should consider the total cost of ownership, which is the long-term cost, and include any additional costs associated with supporting and maintaining the software.

Open source total cost of ownership may be influenced by many elements, such as:

• Software Development Life Cycle costs – any skill and training costs, hardware and software costs associated with open source SDLC
• Additional license costs – open source enhancements may be charged by the community
• Additional maintenance costs – open source may come with periodic payments or a one-time payment
• Additional support costs – open source may be charged for consulting and technical support

What software categories are best suited for open source?

There are no better or worse suited categories. Any software category can be potentially well suited for open source. If you look around, you can find open source solutions in operating systems, i.e. Linux; infrastructures and servers, i.e. Apache, OpenStack, Ken; databases, i.e. MySQL, PostgreSQL; ERP, i.e. ERPNext and MixERP, and many more.

But the best-served software categories, where you can find a vast choice of open source implementations, are: development languages and environments, big data and devops. In those categories there are the most popular open source cloud technologies. Some examples below:

• Development languages and environments: PHP, Rails, Perl, Node.js, Eclipse, etc.
• Big data: Apache Hadoop and its sub-projects Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), YARN, MapReduce, Spark, Hive, Impala, Kafka, Pig, etc.
• DevOps: Subversion, Jenkins, Docker, Cucumber, Jasmine, Ansible, Chef, Puppet, OpenShift, Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes, etc.