Open-source projects are helping to drive adoption of cloud computing, according to a recent study by Black Duck Software.
Open-source projects are helping to drive adoption of cloud computing,
according to a recent study by
Black
Duck Software, a provider of products and services for automating the
management, governance and secure use of open-source software.
Indeed,
open-source projects aimed at enabling enterprise IT application development
for cloud computing are proliferating, Black Duck said in a press release
describing the company's analysis. Cloud computing frameworks and platforms
designed to support integration with cloud services, scalability in private and
public clouds, and manage and store cloud data are growing rapidly and include
well-known open source projects such as
Hadoop,
Eucalyptus,
Hyperic,
deltaCloud,
OpenStack and
OpenECP.
According to the press release, Black Duck analyzed its proprietary
KnowledgeBase of open-source project information to uncover trends in
open-source projects for cloud computing. And, although many
open-source projects
useful for cloud development and deployment don't specifically
reference cloud,
Black Duck found almost 400 projects that did.
The Black Duck analysis shows a 70 percent growth from 2008 to 2009 in
projects specifically associated with cloud computing. These cloud-specific,
open-source projects account for nearly 50 million lines of code, the company
said. Cloud environments referenced by the projects show
Amazon Web Services as the leading
environment, followed by
Microsoft's
Windows Azure,
Google App
Engine, and
Force.com. To
see a chart and list of open-source software
cloud projects data referenced in this release, go to:
http://www.blackducksoftware.com/oss/projects/#cloud
"In the wake of the financial crisis of the past 18-24 months and as
enterprise IT application developers re-architect applications for cloud
environments, they are turning to open-source software for its low cost,
availability and breadth of possible solutions," said Melinda-Carol
Ballou, program director for Application Life-Cycle Management & Executive
Strategies at IDC, in a statement. "Open source's low barriers to entry
and abundance offer significant time-to-market advantages and make it an
emerging and important element of cloud development strategies for enterprise
developers. At the same time, organizations must put in effective open-source
assessment and management capabilities to leverage it as part of a complex software
sourcing strategy for the cloud and for other environments."
"When we began the analysis we expected to find projects focused on
security, privacy, and management," said Peter Vescuso, executive vice
president of Black Duck Software, also in a statement. "The variety of
projects that self-identify as 'cloud' is much broader in scope, reflecting the
sophistication of the cloud application ecosystem and confirming the importance
of OSS cloud software developed to support the needs of enterprise IT."
Black Duck spiders the Internet for open-source code, collecting information
about projects and code into the Black Duck KnowledgeBase, which contains
information on more than 250,000 open-source projects from more than 4,500
unique Websites, the company said.
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