5 Open Source Cloud Platforms for the Enterprise
By investing in an open-source solution, businesses can utilize many service providers to host compatible applications in a PaaS model.
Open source software allows developers to make its source code available to others who would like to view that code, copy it, learn from it, alter it, or share it. Opensource.com explains the publicly accessible software:
“While it originated in the context of computer software development, today the term “open source” designates a set of values—what we call the open source way. Open source projects, products, or initiatives are those that embrace and celebrate open exchange, collaborative participation, rapid prototyping, transparency, meritocracy, and community development.”
For those in the market for a platform as a service provider, the drawback of most PaaS services is the potential for vendor ‘lock-in’. Once an organization implements a service, developers find it difficult to utilize tools outside of the product. Data Science Central, describes the difficulty and limitations that proprietary platforms, can cause an enterprise IT.
“Proprietary platforms limit the ability to use other providers with the knowledge to use a particular product. In contrast, open source products are more flexible and allow users to move between different systems freely. Open source cloud computing offers a greater range of compatibility between several different products. Typically, if a proprietary solution goes out of business the end-user is left with an unusable product. With open source projects, there is usually another project or fork that can take off where the old one left off.”
The standard-based platform is what’s referred to as, ‘vendor-agnostic’ and is more flexible. Many software companies are striving for a standardization of software life cycle management, so that developers have the power to transfer applications across platforms, creating a more malleable infrastructure. The following products are open-source, and are changing the way businesses control their cloud.
OpenShift
OpenShift is Red Hat’s Platform-as-a-Service that allows developers to quickly develop, host, and scale applications in a cloud environment. With OpenShift, businesses have a choice of offerings, including online, on-premise, and open source project options.
Christian Bryant, from Toms IT describes OpenShift Enterprise, a platform that runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux:
“Some of the most popular and widely used web-application frameworks can be found under OpenShift like Rack for Ruby, WSGI for Python, PSGI for Perl and Node.js for JavaScript. Additional frameworks include Laravel, CodeIgniter, CakePHP, Ruby on Rails, Django, Perl Dancer, Flask, Sinatra, Tornado, and Web2py. To stay competitive, OpenShift offers features for the enterprise like accelerated application service delivery, minimized vendor lock-in, self-service and on-demand application stacks, and standardized developer workflows.”
Cloudify
Cloudify is provided as an opensource framework, however unlike how Openshift focuses on application stacks and architecures, Cloudify is designed with the developer in mind, and aims to make it easier to deploy new, simple applications. Cloudify.co describes the Opensource Platform:
“By using recipes to model the application, Cloudify allows users to automate the deployment and management of any existing application stack. In addition, it gives the user a much higher degree of control over the application stack itself – you’re not restricted to a specific version of a web server of a specific load balancer implementation, as you are with the usual PaaS platforms.”
Tsuru
Tsuru is a platform as a service product from Globo.com. The software that runs the service is open-sourced under the Tsuru name, and is available on GitHub. Developers can use Tsuru to deploy web applications in different languages on the platform. Tsuro’s website describes criteria and capabilities of the opensource platform:
“Tsuru supports most web applications, so long as they can run on Linux. Tsuru takes care of maintaining the services underlying the application, high availability, scaling and healing the application as needed.”
Cloud Foundry
Developed by VMware, Cloud Foundry provides dynamic products and as a platform as a service as part of Pivotal software. Their motto, ” Built BY industry leaders, FOR industry leaders”, is telling of it’s large open community of Ruby developers and users who support open source services. Cloud Foundry describes the products features:
“Among the services Cloud Foundry offers for its hosted solution are MySQL DB, VFabric Postgres, MongoDB, Redis, and RabbitMQ. A fairly straightforward model, Cloud Foundry provides mechanisms for deploying applications, designing apps for the cloud, pushing apps, using services, migrating databases, using environment variables and mapping custom domains.”
WSO2 Stratos
WS02 Stratos supports more core services than other available PaaS options today and is a good option for enterprises that seek to “extend the flexibility and innovation achieved from implementing heterogeneous environments on-premises, into the cloud,” According to Businesswire.com.
“WSO2 Stratos offers extensible cartridge architecture, enhanced cloud deployment support for multiple IaaS , as well as easy SaaS app development. The PaaS also provides data storage with easy access, caching, and queuing, along with a SaaS app as a multi-tenant application, allowing each tenant to deploy their own customized logic alongside it.”
The company is noted by Gartner as being one of the leading competitors in the application infrastructure market.
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