The Linux Foundation | 17 November 2016
Some of the most successful public companies today are built around cloud-native applications — a fashionable term that simply means they’re designed to run in the cloud. Netflix, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Amazon have all leveraged open source components within a distributed, microservices-based architecture to quickly deliver new products and services that are cost-effective and responsive to market demands and changes.
By breaking applications up into microservices, or distinct, single-purpose services that are loosely coupled with dependencies and explicitly described through service endpoints, they have significantly increased the overall agility and maintainability of applications and used that to gain competitive advantage.
The rest of the market has scrambled to replicate this architecture and approach, cobbling together their own solutions using custom scripts and open source software — often using the open source versions of these web giants’ own infrastructure (i.e., Google’s Borg, which became Kubernetes; Twitter’s Mesos project, VMware’s Cloud Foundry, etc.).
This experimentation has set off a chain of innovation with four notable trends, still playing out today:
1. Increasing consumption of public cloud resources
2. Adoption of container technologies like Docker and others (Fifty-three percent of organizations are either investigating or using containers in development or in production, according to a recent Cloud Foundry report)
3. The rise of DevOps as the most effective method for application delivery in the cloud
4. An explosion in available open source tooling as user companies like Walmart and Capital One release their management software under open source licenses.
From banking and finance to automotive and healthcare, companies are facing the reality that they’re now in the technology business. In this new reality, cloud strategies can make or break an organization’s market success. And successful cloud strategies are built on Linux and open source software.
As cloud adoption grows, open source technologies will continue to be the source of innovation and the foundation for new markets and ecosystems. For each of the trends, above, there are open source projects actively involved in creating the future of IT infrastructure on which companies will deliver their products and services, in the coming year and beyond.
Organizations that wish to succeed should become familiar with these projects, the categories of technology in which they are influential, and the ways in which they can help companies remain competitive in this age of digital transformation.
In our next installment in this cloud series, we’ll discuss the trend toward microservices architectures and public cloud usage.
Learn more about trends in open source cloud computing and see a list of the top open source cloud computing projects. Download The Linux Foundation’s Guide to the Open Cloud report today!
Read the other articles in this series:
Trends in the Open Source Cloud: A Shift to Microservices and the Public Cloud