Meanwhile, at the Foundation, we began to understand the massive potential to help the entire industry. Multiple other projects had expressed interest in adopting the Service Broker API and integrating with Cloud Foundry. In the spirit of open source collaboration, the Cloud Foundry Foundation and Cloud Native Computing Foundation founded a working group comprised of members from Google, Engine Yard, Fujitsu, IBM, Pivotal and Red Hat, with engineers who work across projects for both foundations.
Although SAP had started to contribute to the open-source community a little before, with its cloud platform, this greatly expanded. The rise of cloud computing, the upcoming SaaS alternatives for business solutions, the sudden and dramatic demise of BlackBerry in mind, as observed at the time, SAP was at the crossroads.
Microsoft joins the open source Cloud Foundry Foundation
While several container orchestrators exist, Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for the cloud-native world. It's a portable, extensible, open-source platform for managing containerized workloads.
Cloud providers offer a rich assortment of managed backing services. Instead of owning the service, you simply consume it. The cloud provider operates the resource at scale and bears the responsibility for performance, security, and maintenance. Monitoring, redundancy, and availability are built into the service. Providers guarantee service level performance and fully support their managed services - open a ticket and they fix your issue.
SAP is observing a growing trend in the industry to adopt containers for running large workloads as an alternative to virtualization. Availability of technologies like open source Kubernetes both on-premises and in the cloud provides flexibility for migration of workloads between environments to meet critical business needs. The increasing momentum behind the standardization of container orchestration technology via CNCF is also conducive for a stronger ecosystem and richer solutions for enterprises.
SAP has been using Kubernetes internally for some time both in its production services and in its Concur subsidiary, and intends to work with additional CNCF projects to bring added containerization and orchestration advances to enterprises. Additionally, as a platinum member of both CNCF and the Cloud Foundry Foundation, SAP will strive to provide both customer choice in cloud application deployment strategies as well as points of integration and partnership between these two important open source organizations.
Security is a key consideration for any organization seeking to standardize and scale their cloud-native platforms. Falco, the behavioral activity monitoring tool from Sysdig, is becoming a popular option for open source container runtime security on cloud-native platforms built using Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, and OpenShift.
We at Sysdig are very excited to continue and expand our involvement with broader open source communities. Since the early days of tools like Wireshark, WinPcap, and Sysdig our team has passionately supported the open source philosophy. We hope that Falco becoming part of the CNCF Sandbox will expand its potential use cases, expand our contributor base, strengthen our end-user community, and ultimately contribute to making cloud-native applications more secure.
Open source software has become a foundation of many of today's greatest statups and Fortune 500 companies alike. But open source is so much mire than software. From open collaboration to open governance to open innovation. Being open has strategic advantages no company should ignore.
The biggest issue in changing a monolith into microservices lies in changing the communication pattern. As the industry adopts microservices, the need for an open efficient framework which works well for developers is becoming essential. Enter gRPC. It is an open source project form Google which can make connecting, operating and debugging distributed systems as easy as making local function calls; the framework handles all the complexities normally associated with enforcing strict service contracts, data serialization, efficient network communication, authentications and access control, distributed tracing and so on. Come listen to why gRPC may be a strong foundation for smarter clients and servers in cloud native world than http/json !
Ashesh Badani, general manager for the Red Hat cloud business unit, says Red Hat is committed to incorporating a variety of open-source technologies into a platform built on top of Kubernetes that continues to blur the line between platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and container-as-a-service (CaaS) environments. Earlier this week Red Hat picked up a significant endorsement for its approach from SAP, which announced that its implementation of an Apache Spark in-memory computing framework running on Kubernetes is now supported on the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.
The company has watched the evolution of cloud computing and has come to the conclusion that the open source OpenStack effort has the strongest support behind it, said Dave LeClair, Stratus' senior directory of strategy. "OpenStack is gaining a lot of momentum in the public and private cloud space," LeClair explained. "The OpenStack community is expanding rapidly."
I asked if he had considered CloudStack, the open source cloud compute offering backed by Citrix. While LeClair noted Citrix is a Stratus partner, he believes CloudStack lacks the support that OpenStack has gained over the past two years. "I'm not sure they have the staying power," he said. "They don't seem to have the community around them that OpenStack has."
The large brokerage firm Fidelity Investments is running private clouds based on the OpenStack open source environment with an eye toward eventually bursting to public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds.
That's where the similarities stop. Microsoft's cloud OS is based on a combination of Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012, while HP Cloud OS is based on the open source OpenStack platform, providing a common environment across its Converged Cloud Portfolio.
The deal is the largest to date for IBM CEO Ginni Rometty, who has stepped up IBM's cloud efforts since taking the reins a year-and-a-half ago. Rumors surfaced back in March that IBM was circling the wagons of Rackspace as well as SoftLayer. While Rackspace is larger than SoftLayer, some viewed the former as a more logical choice because its compute and storage infrastructure were based on OpenStack. Rackspace was also the founding corporate sponsor of OpenStack, the rapidly expanding open source cloud computing operating environment. 2ff7e9595c
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