Open Source Driving Cloud Adoption Says Research

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.

Hadoop, Eucalyptus, Hyperic

According to the press release, Black Duck analysed 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 (OSS) 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, organisations 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.”

Cloud Applications

“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.