What is the future of open source and where does it sit in the cloud?

Over the last few years we have seen an increasing level of companies turn to open source software. Since 2010 the use of open source to run Business IT environments has doubled and today 78% of companies run on open source. It is becoming increasingly clear that price is not the only advantage this software holds. Open source as a practice is outperforming proprietary packages on quality, cost, customization, and security and is driving innovation in some of the world’s biggest and most well-known companies.

Companies are turning to open source due to the higher quality and greater flexibility that it offers over “off the shelf” solutions. Businesses can take a piece of open source software and tweak it to suit their needs meaning a smarter operation and a more timely service to the end user. Since the code is open, it's simply a matter of modifying it to add the functionality they want, and as a result businesses who have embraced this way of working are showing signs of significant growth.

At the same time as this increase in open source use, the adoption of cloud technology shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, Gartner has predicted that Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) will grow by 40% in 2016.

As a result of these evolutions in technology procurement, many enterprises are starting to deploy these two approaches together, including on IaaS, Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) projects. Currently, over one third of enterprises are looking to start their own external open source projects in the next two to three years resulting in a greater use of open source cloud services such as OpenStack.

Between, 2015-2017, IDC expects there will be significant standardization in this area with regards to the critical elements of IaaS and PaaS across OpenStack, CloudFoundry and Docker. This kind of standardization means CIOs will be able to undertake their open source cloud projects more easily and confident of interoperability.

As a result in the coming years more and more companies will opt for open source cloud services over proprietary software as it allows enterprises to mold tools and services to fit their business needs. With open source being increasingly considered as the future of cloud computing more options, with greater capabilities, such as Cloud Foundry and OpenStack will start to appear.

As part of this journey there are some key evolutionary stages that will take place. IT teams will continue, and even increase their existing relationships with their cloud vendors while the open source cloud market matures. At the same time, large enterprises will start looking at cloud architecture as strategic and begin evaluating and piloting CloudFoundry and OpenStack to test what it takes to build their own clouds using these standards. We will also see how real time cost analysis tools will gain importance for monitoring and predicting the cost of cloud operations. This will be important for businesses to compare and contrast open source cloud over closed cloud providers.

Ultimately as open source evolves and merges with cloud, companies more and more will turn to the flexibility and cost effectiveness of open source “do it yourself” IaaS. As Clayton Christiansen has articulated well in his book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, market disruption is always driven by the low-cost technology that becomes “good enough”. Eventually, what was the low-cost technology becomes the market leader. All the buzz and excitement surrounding OpenStack always boils down to one answer: Cost and freedom of choice!

Statistics are based on Future of Open Source Survey 2015 by North Bridge and Black Duck.