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OSBR April edition on Cloud Computing

I had the privilege of being the guest editor for the April edition of the Open Source Business Resource. The topic for April is cloud computing. In my opinion, a big part of the success of cloud computing is the extensive use of open source software, especially the LAMP stack, which lowers the overall costs of the cloud services. With cloud computing, the operating system, the application server, and the underlying hardware has become a commodity.

I was fortunate enough to get some well known writers to contribute articles on cloud computing from many different perspectives. Read my editor’s notes to see my thoughts on open source and the cloud and to see a summary of the articles. Here are some excerpts:

Cloud computing may be the biggest game changer within the enterprise since the adoption of the Internet in the 1990s and the personal computer in the 1980s.

The LAMP stack has become widely adopted as the standard engine running much of the cloud services. With the exception of Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, most cloud service providers have embraced open source software, allowing them to drive costs down while providing reliable services for their customers.

Pay-as-you-go is the new economic model for IT as we enter a new decade. Gone will be the days of making large purchases of commercial software with huge maintenance costs.

Open source software will play a huge role in making the shift to cloud computing economically feasible. At the same time, commercial software companies are racing to the cloud and are struggling to replace their expensive software licensing models with a pay-as-you-go model in order to make them an attractive alternative to open source software in the cloud.

Here is a list of the authors and their topics:

David Linthicum – The value of cloud computing

Fred Waldner – Cloud Computing: What is it, and How Will it Affect Organizations?

Daniel Crenna – Re-evaluating Open Source for Sustaining Competitive Advantage for Hosted Applications

Ronald Schmelzer – Private Clouds: Reality or Fog?

Tom Lounibos – Performance Testing From the Cloud

John Crupi & Chris Warner – Enterprise Mashups: Cloud-Based, Cloud-Driven and Cloud-Derived Applications

I thought all of the authors wrote excellent articles.  Probably the most thought provoking article was from Daniel Crenna.  I highly recommend you read his article and comment on it.  It really got me thinking about how the shift to the cloud will change how we view commercial software forever.

I hope you enjoy reading the content as much as I did!  A special thanks goes out to editor Dru Lavigne for organizing and editing all of this content and for patiently waiting for me to finish my part!  You can follow her on Twitter at @osbr

How to give back to an Open Source community

Dru Lavigne, editor of Open Source Business Resource (OBSR) asked my opinion on “How can an individual or small business give back to an open source community? “. As some of you may know, I am a big advocate of open source and contribute to the Open Office community in a marketing capacity. There are many things one can do to contribute beyond coding. Please read the Q&A section of the February issue of OBSR or click here to see my answer to Dru’s question.

Speaking of open source, this blog post was created on a Linux Mint OS using Wordpress.

Why an Open Source SOA stack makes sense

Dave Linthicum wrote a post today called Open Source SOA provides some major advantages. In his post Dave stated:

When it comes to SOA, I think open source provides two major advantages:

• First, it’s typically much less expensive than the tools and the technology that are proprietary.
• Second, they are typically much more simplistic and easier to understand and use.

To the second point, simplicity. The open source SOA vendors seem to take a much more rudimentary approach to SOA, and their tools seem to be much easier to understand and, in some cases, use. While some people want complex, powerful tools, the reality is that most SOAs don’t need them. If you’re honest with the requirements of the project, you’ll see that good enough is, well, good enough.

Great point Dave. I would also add another clear advantage which I learned the hard way. On a previous enterprise wide SOA initiative, I drank the cool-aid that the vendor stack was an integrated stack and was simpler to deploy and manage over a stack of a mix of vendors. What I found out is that the mega vendors (IBM, Oracle, etc.) have bought so many pure play tools (rules engines, BPMs tools, data services and MDM tools, governance tools, etc.) that the smooth integration ends when the Power Point decks are closed. In reality, the mega vendor stacks are a hodge podge of rushed acquisition and integration efforts. The underlying architecture of each tool within the stack are completely different and there are very few people (if any) within the organization who understands the complete stack. In fact, we were dealing with two very different organizations when dealing with support and they were not in sync. Eventually the entire company was consumed by another mega vendor (you can probably guess which acquisition this was) and the whole product roadmap was turned upside down.

Now let’s look at some of the well established open source stack vendors like WSO2, MuleSource, and RedHat. These vendors do not suffer from acquisition madness and chaos. If fact, they are all built on a consistent architecture and do offer smooth integration between the various layers of the stack. Do they have all of the features of the commercial products? No. Do they have enough features for most SOA initiatives. Definitely. I wrote a post on CIO.com called Tight Budgets? Try open source SOA. Here is a quick summary of the advantages I discussed (read the article for the details):

1. Try before you buy
2. Lower cost of entry
3. Cost effective support
4. Core competency
5. For the people by the people

So what open source options do I have, you might ask? The following picture shows the open source tools that I prefer for my new SOA initiative. We are using a combination of WSO2, Intalio, Drools, Liferay, and PushToTest.

This is just one example of many. You can mix and match tools from different open source communities or you could standardize on one community. Here is an example of Red Hat’s jBoss SOA stack.

And MuleSource has a well known suite of tools as well.

Many organizations are still not very comfortable with open source for mission critical initiatives. I have debunked many of the open source myths in the past (here, here, and here).

If there ever was a time to embrace open source, the time is now in this harsh economy. As commercial SOA vendors continue to get gobbled up by the mega vendors, it is time to seriously consider alternatives.

Open Source SOA

Many companies are investing heavily in SOA these days. At the same time, IT is being challenged to reduce its costs. But to provide the technologies to reduce costs, we first must spend tons of money, right? Wrong! Read my post on CIO.com this week called Tight Budgets? Try Open Source SOA.

Microsoft Free – One year later

In May of 2007 I wrote a post called Open Source and Microsoft Free. Little did I know that this post would show up on Digg, Slashdot, Craigslist, and several other popular web sites and become a platform for both the Linux and Microsoft camps to wage yet another flame war.

This whole “Microsoft free” experiment started when a colleague of mine challenged me to eat my own dog food after reading many of my posts about my dabbling with open source technologies. The next day, after a few blue screens of death and various issues with Outlook, I grabbed a Ubuntu CD and installed it on my laptop….at work! From that day forward, I have not used a single Microsoft product at work. It has been one year now and I have survived with Thunderbird and Evolution, Open Office, Firefox, and many other open source replacements for Microsoft products.

I put “Microsoft free” in quotes because there are a few exceptions. First, I did install IE 6.0 under wine for that rare occasion that I stumble across a website that only works on IE. Second, there is no answer for Visio. Most of the Visio diagrams that I needed to read were embedded in design documents in Word which I can read with Open Office Writer. But for those that I needed Visio for, I opened them at home on my XP box (I have 1 XP, 1 Vista, and 5 Linux boxes at home). I also used Visio at home when I had to create Visio diagrams. The issue is Visio’s proprietary format is not available for developers to write a translation utility for.

With those two issues aside, which represents about 1% of my overall usage on my laptop, my Open Source experience was nearly flawless. Open Office worked remarkably well both receiving Microsoft Office files and creating files in Office format. I exchanged literally thousands of documents between Microsoft Office and Open Office. I never encountered a single issue with Word and Excel and occasionally encountered minor formatting issues with Power Point files. The formatting issues where nothing more then some minor placement issues which probably occurred less then 5% of the time.

Over the course of the year I experimented with Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Freespire, Mepis, and PCLinuxOS. I settled on Kubuntu and recently upgraded with ease to the latest version, Hardy Heron. Here is my analysis of the different Linux distros from last fall. With this “Microsoft free” laptop I have coexisted with 1000+ employees who use XP and various verions of Office including 2007 (the 2007 compatibility add-on works fine). I also delivered presentations at conferences using Open Office Impress and traveled across the country and internationally with no issues with wireless connectivity.

I am not in any camps. I use XP and Linux at home and like both. I gave Outlook the boot years ago at home and do just fine with Thunderbird. It has every feature I need. I do however have problems with Vista. But my message here is not about recommending what tools that my readers should use. My message is that I performed at a high level at work while using Linux, Open Office, and other open source products. These tools did not hinder my ability to do my job and did not impact anyone else at my job. I was able to productively coexist with no Microsoft tools in a Microsoft shop. That is all I am trying to say.

I am not going to recommend to anybody that they change their company standards away from Microsoft. What I will tell you is that open source is a viable alternative that can be used in a production environment. So when you see flame wars where the two camps argue back and forth about their favorite technology, you can point to this post when people claim that Linux and Open Office just won’t work in the work place. I have validated that they do work for over 365 days now. Whether we should use these tools at work is a whole different story that really depends on factors like corporate culture, skill sets, budgets, user base, executive support, and many others.

All I can say is that for the last year, I have been using Open Source exclusively and I am loving it!

Open Source – Debunking Myths – Part 3

In part 1 I debunked the “OSS is bad for the economy myth”. In part2 I showed six different models for OSS support. In this third and final post on debunking OSS myths, I will address these two statements:

• OSS products are second rate (”created in the garage” mentality)
• OSS can’t be good because it is free

There are many OSS products that are highly reliable and run the systems of very successful companies and web sites that have millions of users. Just look at some the names of highest traffic web sites ranked by Alexa that use the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Python, or Perl) stack (the link next to the website shows their underlying architecture):

1. Yahoo (LAMP)
2. Google (LAMP)
3. Youtube (LAMP)
4. Windows Live (Win)
5. MSN (Win)
6. MySpace (Win)
7. Wikipedia (LAMP)
8. Facebook (LAMP)
9. Blogger.com (LAMP)
10. Yahoo JP (LAMP)

Go to this link to look up the architecture of your favorite sites.

Other major companies using LAMP are Amazon, Disney, Boeing to name a few. Read this article called How Linux saved Amazon millions to see the real value in open source software. Twitter is another site that is growing like crazy. Look at the OSS that it uses:

But major websites aren’t the only ones leveraging OSS. Most of the major technology companies have an open source strategy now. How about this list (click on the links to see each company’s Open Source page):

• IBM
• Sun
• BEA
• Oracle
• HP

All of these companies are using OSS along side their own products to drive costs down. Most non-Microsoft development these days leverage a ton of open source tools. Look at the tools in the J2EE stack:

• JBoss
• Tomcat
• Struts
• Hibernate
• Spring
• PHP
• Perl
• Python and more

So much for the comments “Free means crap” or the ignorant “garbage.com” comments. These tools are the real deal. Are there crappy OSS products? Sure, but no different then the crappy proprietary products. Even Microsoft is starting to pay attention to Open Source. Although they are doing because OSS is a threat while the other companies are leveraging it as a competitive advantage.

So this concludes my 3-part series on debunking OSS myths. Anytime you hear the myths or FUD be spewed by those who refuse to acknowledge reality or just have not done their homework, please forward them these articles so they can learn what most of the rest of the world already know.

Open Source – Debunking Myths – Part 2

In part 1, I highlighted four myths (FUD) that I felt needed to be addressed:

1. OSS is bad for the economy and defies the values of capitalism
2. OSS support is bad, slow, and/or non-existent
3. OSS products are second rate (”created in the garage” mentality)
4. OSS can’t be good because it is free

In this post I will discuss the myths about open source support. I have heard every quote from “You can’t get support for open source” to “Where are you going to get support, in a chat room?” It is obvious that people who make these statements have not done their homework or just choose to dislike OSS because of their long history of snuggling up with their favorite vendor(s).

There are many options for getting OSS support. I will list six that I am aware of.

Single Vendor Support
Many well established open source projects offer support for a fee. Typically these support fees are minimal when compared to proprietary software where they charge 18-21% of the purchase price. Some projects offer a totally free version of their software with a subset of features but offer an enterprise license with full support that has the complete bundle of features. In either case, this model is similar to the normal proprietary model where you pay for the support of your product. Also, many major software vendors like IBM, Sun, and Oracle are leveraging open source products within their software offerings. In cases like this, these vendors provide support for the OSS products. The only downside to this is they are often not certified on the most recent version of the OSS products.

Stack Vendor Support
In this model, a single company provides support services for a suite of products. Companies like SpikeSource & SourceLabs provide support for a suite of products while Redhat provides support for its own “appstack” which includes jBoss, Red Hat Linux, Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and languages like Perl and PHP. The following diagram is from SpikeSource’s web site that shows a few different stacks that are supported.

Community
All OSS products have community support. Many people not familiar with OSS believe that this is nothing more then interacting with some hacker in his garage. This might be true if you are betting your business on a product with a development team of three (which is not highly recommended). But most serious OSS contenders have a huge community following which provides 24×7x365 support from people all around the world. This is where I see an advantage of community support over proprietary software support. In the OSS world, it doesn’t matter if you are a billion dollar company or a startup, your issues are equally important and addressed. In the proprietary world, top customers typically get priority over others because huge contracts carry a lot of clout. Many critical fixes and security issues are fixed and patched literally overnight. In fact, if you know how to fix the issue, you can make the changes and submit it to the project team to be reviewed and possibly patched. That beats waiting for the next service patch!

Do It Yourself
You also have the option to not pay any support and fully support the OSS yourself. This makes sense for most non-mission critical products like blogging software (WordPress) and wikis (Mediawiki), but is not recommended for mission critical products like server based Linux and ESB’s like Mule.

Use consultants
Another option is to use consultants. This can be individuals who are experts with certain OSS products or companies that specialize in installation and/or support services for various products. You can see a huge list of consulting companies on Sourceforge.net who specialize in certain areas. Some companies use consultants for installations and upgrades, but chose the “Do it yourself” method for everything else. Sourceforge also offers support services for several products.

Mix and Match
The sixth model is to mix and match a combination of the five support models above. Many OSS products rely on a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack. A company may already have a stack support vendor it deals with and may choose one of the other models to support the specific product. I’ll use my Mediawiki example again. Mediawiki may not be a mission critical application at your company, but a few other applications might rely heavily on LAMP, including the wiki. The LAMP stack may already be covered by a stack vendor so you may chose the community or “Do it yourself” models for the wiki.

So the next time somebody tells you that you can’t get support for OSS, forward them this link. This myth is pure FUD. I am not saying the all OSS products have good support, but then again, that is true for proprietary vendors also. Part of the vendor selection process for OSS should include your support requirements. If support is critical, make sure you pick a product that has strong support options in one or more of these models.

Open Source – Debunking Myths – Part 1

On the ITToolbox community, we have some very passionate bloggers both for and against open source software (OSS). I am a proponent of both OSS and proprietary software. As an architect, I view both of these as tools in my toolbox. The trick is to know when to use the right tool for the right job. It is unfortunate that some people think there is no place for OSS. Here are a few of the myths (FUD) that I continue to hear from people who insist on depriving their company from leveraging OSS tools even when it may be the best solution for a given problem.

1. OSS is bad for the economy and defies the values of capitalism
2. OSS support is bad, slow, and/or non-existent
3. OSS products are second rate (”created in the garage” mentality)
4. OSS can’t be good because it is free

Myth #1 – OSS is bad for the economy
This could not be further from the truth. Here is a real life scenario from my trip to France last week.

One of our business partners is in the software development business. They are a small company with small IT budgets whose customers are primarily in the retail industry, mainly grocery chains. The retail grocery industry is a very low margin business and one where companies are in real danger of being crushed by the likes of Walmart and Carrefour. These companies are extremely frugal and the big boys have a major say in the price of goods and services. One of our partner’s core strategies is to leverage open source technologies to keep both their costs down and to keep the cost of their solutions down. Due to privacy concerns, some of these retailers are demanding that solutions providers shift from the current ASP or SAAS models to a shrink-wrapped model (buying the software and running it locally). This is currently not feasible for companies heavily invested in proprietary software due to the licensing costs of vendor software that is involved. The retailer would have to pay for the operating system, the database, the application server, the BPM tools, the middleware, etc. This would add up to a hefty bill. Using OSS like the LAMP suite (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PhP) and Intalio for BPM, this solution becomes affordable and a competitive advantage to sell to the hundreds of retailers in this space.

Please read this article from Wired called Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business so you will understand my next point. Here is an excerpt from the article.

Technology is giving companies greater flexibility in how broadly they can define their markets, allowing them more freedom to give away products or services to one set of customers while selling to another set.

Let’s look at this blog for starters. I use free tools to publish my lessons learned and ideas on both Blogspot and ITToolbox. In both cases, a software product and a service was offered to me for free. In return, Google and ITToolbox get value by increasing traffic which increases advertising revenue. I paid nothing for the software or the services. I dedicate a lot of my personal time and expertise to my blogs because I get recognition, increase my network, and I learn from others. So in this case, “Free” is actually a revenue generator and is good for the economy. In the example above, free software allows my company and our business partner to compete by controlling our costs. These OSS products allow us to generate revenue and allows the retailers to improve their products and services by leveraging our loyalty marketing solutions. Once again, “Free” is generating revenue.

The anti-OSS folks argue that OSS is taking food off the plates of developers and giants like Microsoft. Yes this is not good news for Microsoft but there is more to the world’s economy then the market share of software giants. Without OSS, this new surge in Social Networking would not be what it is today. Look at all of these new startup companies that have emerged over the last few years. Starting a Internet company from the ground up has never been more affordable. Look at tools like Twitter, Facebook, Wordpress, MediWiki, Joomla and others. These tools are changing the way the world communicates and they are all free. The more collaborative the world is, the stronger the global economy gets. These are all good for the economy.

I believe if people would stop thinking of OSS as Linux versus Windows, we could look past our “religious” beliefs about our favorite operating system and start focusing on things like controlling costs, share holder value, flexibility, negotiating power against vendors, and more. In part two I will discuss the myth about support for OSS. Until then, I look forward to the debate that follows. I ask that we keep it professional!

Is IT its own worse enemy?

I read this post from Stewart Mader’s blog on wiki patterns today and it talks about a challenge to the adoption of wiki is the fact that the new tools are too inexpensive or even free (open source).

Here is a key quote:

Sandy Kemsley’s fourth challenge to social media/enterprise 2.0 in organizations:

The fact that these technologies are inexpensive (or even free) and quick to implement causes them to be discounted by executives who are used to spending millions on information management systems.

Isn’t it time that executives stopped running their IT shops like it is 1980? Spending millions on large vendors may make it easier for one to sleep at night, but it is not the best use of corporate dollars. I have been in IT for a long time and I have witnessed the same pattern across several companies over the last 20+ years. The pattern that I am talking about is IT puts more weight on “manageability” then they do on customer requirements. Some shops are so married to big vendors that they are not taking advantage of open source solutions or even worse, they are limiting the vendor selection process down to a set of tools that do not meet the customer’s needs. When this happens, IT becomes its own worst enemy. First of all, adoption of tools that the users do not want or do not value as high as other tools can be a major challenge. I have seen my share of shelf-ware over the years. Second, forcing customers into solutions does not bode well for customer satisfaction and may cause the customers to look elsewhere next time. Third and maybe the worst case of all, sticking to the major vendors at all costs may prevent IT from selecting any tool due to high costs or lack of a sufficient tool. To put this into perspective, the user suffers because our favorite vendor can’t deliver.

Here is an example. If you look at Web 2.0 tools today, most of the top tools are either open source or provided by startups or companies without billions of dollars in revenue. IT shops who still stick to principles from 20 years ago will simply not invest in enterprise blogs, wikis, and social networking tools. The big vendors either do not have the tools or the tools that they have cost a significant sum of money. Trying to justify spending a large amount of money on better collaboration tools is a major challenge. With open source or low cost alternatives, it is much easier to start small and grow adoption over time.

At the end of the day, we should understand that the reason that corporations fund IT departments is so that our internal and external customers have the tools, products, and services they need to do their job. The world is changing and IT must change with it. In addition to the normal technical requirements (manageability, scalability, etc.), the vendor selection process should consider the following:

• Buy vs. Build (is it a core competency?)
• Evaluate open source alternatives
• Evaluate SaaS alternatives
• What is the vendor’s SOA strategy (integration and agility)

Is your IT shop still stuck in the 1980’s? If so, what are you going to do to educate your executive team? Do the research for them and show them where technology is going. The worst thing that can happen is that people will learn something.

Switching Office Suites from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.

As I mentioned in the past, I contribute to the Open Office project in the area of marketing. I found this great post today about switching to Office and I thought I’d pass it along.

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