Black Duck Software, a company that helps businesses automate the management of enterprise-level open source software, released the results of a recent study revealing a sharp rise in the number of open source applications for cloud computing. The number of projects under development associated with cloud computing jumped a whopping 70 percent from 2008 to 2009. To find out more about what these numbers mean, I checked in with Peter Vescuso, Executive Vice President of Marketing and Business Development.
Nearly 400 projects in Black Duck’s knowledge base are aimed at managing and storing data in the cloud, scaling private and public clouds or provide support integration with cloud services. While not all projects referenced usability in specific cloud environment, among those that did Amazon EC2 and S3 took a sizable lead ahead of Microsoft Azure, Google Apps Engine, and other platforms.
Many of the projects provide solutions for cloud security, privacy and management, but that came as no surprise to the research team. “The reason we thought we’d see those categories high on the list is they are the ones most often cited as the leading issues for cloud.” says Vescuso. “The ones we found outside of that scope were more about enabling infrastructure and scalability, such as Eucalyptus, and enabling development, such as deltaCloud.”
A 70 percent growth in cloud computing apps doesn’t mean there isn’t room for more within the ecosytem, however. “Database scalability is still an issue,” says Vescuso. “Traditional RDBMSs [relational database management systems] assumed stateless applications that store everything in the database. Scale was achieved by scaling up the DB to bigger hardware, or adding app servers (scaling out). While there are a number of projects focused on addressing the issue of database scalability in the cloud — by separating data from the application, as in so-called NoSQL solutions such as the Voldemort and Cassandra projects — this area is still young and unproven.”
Image courtesy of Black Duck. Graph published August, 2010.
