Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.
Open source solutions are usually brought to life because of someone’s yearning to solve a problem and share the solution with the rest of the world. Or perhaps when inventors are merely trying to get more eyes on the code for help with hidden bugs and fixes.
This is not a pitch for open-source. Rather a highlight of one of the things that helps move the DevOps needle forward. And because many if not most, of the PaaS and IaaS developer tools are leveraging some open source in their products. Thus the contributions of large companies have benefited them as well.
For instance, Apache Hadoop is a great example of open source software used to enable highly-available and distributed processing of large datasets across clusters of failure-prone computers . The Hadoop project was validated when Yahoo created what they called the largest Hadoop deployment in 2008, and hired Hadoop developers to further improve the solution. It was initially intended to solve scalability problems with an open source search engine, Nutch. Soon, high-profile outfits including Facebook, Twitter and eBay joined the play and helped turn Hadoop into a data crunching monster, based on an army of dirt-cheap servers. In the DevOps spirit of things, Hadoop changes the dynamics and economics of compute power as a highly scalable, cost effective, flexible and fault tolerant computing solution.
Leading technology giants that predate this movement are taking advantage of open source, but also making available great new open source tools. For instance, Salesforce made available a range of tools for developers to build wearable gadgetry apps connected with its own cloud services. VMware produced the open source cloud computing platform Cloud Foundry, at a time when customers were pursuing open source alternatives to their flagship software solutions. And Google’s Android mobile operating system is the most popular open source project in recent times. Google now dominates the smartphone advertisement revenue market, where there wasn’t an open source alternative to the proprietary and closed Apple iOS mobile platform, in just a few years.
Benefits of open source goes beyond individual developers. Companies are able to better utilize their infrastructure, as a significant proportion of their source code comes from open source projects, where in-house developers focus on enhancing the code to fit the organization, and used as their secret sauce.
Even the less-technical e-commerce companies like Etsy have open the doors to their open source software repositories, for DevOps to take advantage from. And one of the favorite DevOps case studies, Netflix, has published a library of homegrown open source solutions to assist DevOps high-availability, cloud management, builds and deployment, security and infrastructure, among others. But while they have an open-source initiative, like stated above, they leverage other closed source tools like ElasticBox, which helps with application component development and IT as a Service (ITaaS).
The DevOps framework is focused on better processes implemented by better communication. Â But in those processes is a large stack of tools to execute on automation. And in order to keep moving forward at the speed of new processes and requirements, we need new tools, and ever improving ones.
There is no better place to get these tools then large applications that leverage tools extensively and improve them to better meet their needs.
Regardless of the intention with open source projects, DevOps has emerged as a direct beneficiary of the Open Source Movement, which one analyst believes is the very reason behind the birth of DevOps. PaaS and IaaS vendors learn from open-source tools and their usage, or implement them in their products for better offerings. Open Source will be in the mix for all technology companies, along with highly focused and tuned pay solutions.
