Cloud Computing: Is Open Source the Future
Published on 19 June 14
NgWei
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Cloud computing offers flexibility and scalability at a fraction of cost that businesses had to bear earlier. While small and medium scale businesses are moving many of their processes to public clouds, large scale organizations are busy setting up private clouds for more security and control.
The benefits of cloud computing are huge and it’s just impossible for any business enterprise to ignore. But, several IT specialists and advocates of free networks are worried that large scale adoption of cloud computing may well result in death of democracy for the Internet.
Their concerns are indeed valid because the Internet, with the advent of cloud computing, is slowly transforming from a decentralized to a highly centralized structure.
Fact of the matter is that the World Wide Web thrived primarily because no one really owned it. It’s a connected web of independent nodes. This is going to change as more and more individuals, businesses and agencies move to the cloud.
Consider the following two scenarios:
-· Case One: 1 million companies using 10 popular proprietary cloud platforms (highly centralized model). The data of all these companies would be stored on servers of just 10 companies. The rest, you can well imagine.
-· Case Two: 1 million companies using 5 different open-source cloud platforms either with their own storage or through hundreds of small and medium scale service providers. The democratic structure of the Internet stays intact. Companies will have an option not to use proprietary cloud computing platforms if they don’t want to.
Just as open source technologies have stormed the web and mobile spaces, it is perhaps just a matter of time before open source cloud computing platforms are around.Openstack (funded by NASA & Rackspace Cloud) is one fine example.
This open source cloud platform is basically an operating system that will run on any standard hardware. So, anyone around the globe will be able to use Openstack to provide cloud solutions to others.
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