Standards Address Emerging Business Challenges
May 22, 2012, Open Source Business Conference, San Francisco—Angel Luis Diaz from IBM coordinated a presentation with Mark Collier from Rackspace and Scott Handy from IBM on leveraging standards. The issues of open source software and open stacks of hardware are influencing many business decisions.
Diaz opened with a review of technology adoption and referenced Goeffey Moore’s concepts of a chasm between early adopters and the mainstream. Open source provides operating dexterity, but also offers opportunities and concerns. Buyers are worried about how to get to the cloud, will they be locked-in to a solution, and what skill sets do they need to operate the systems.
When the Web got started, they needed open source and standards to work. The industry developed HTML and used other existing standards for transport. Now, new standards for the cloud are in the same state as the beginning of the Web. XML was developed for math operations. Now it is used for everything.
There are many different approaches to standard development. The key issue for a useful standard is to get engaged at all levels. Good standards need user involvement, user-driven requirements, innovation, architecture, and have to be practical.
Architectures have to be based on existing systems and standards, or they will not be accepted. The de-facto standards and protocols as well as existing systems have to influence the standard. At the same time, the architects need to consider what to add and what constitutes a reference platform. It helps to understand how the various pieces fit together.
User-driven standards for the cloud have to take into account use cases for the standards and guidelines for development. The specifics such as IaaS are being discussed in the context of understanding the various use cases and patterns,
The innovations have to address development issues, continuous delivery, loosely coupled integrated systems, and portable workloads. The standards need to define topologies, terminology, and reference the other existing standards.
Collier described issues in the open stack, and their application to private and public cloud systems. Practical details are important for solutions to become standards. The open stack community is growing with many new corporate sponsors and volunteers. The latest release, Essex, is the result of the efforts from over 200 people and 55 companies
Open stack addresses the resources plus management and automation structures for the generic hardware for a cloud. As a result of vendor cooperation, there is greater interoperability in cloud systems. The latest release has better quality due to improved tools. Some of the new tools include new distributions from Ubuntu, and portable devstack and trystack as a sandbox for developers.
OpenStack is moving to become a foundation in Q3 this year. They are codifying their development flow and philosophy and are getting resources for the foundation’s mission.
Handy gave an example of their efforts to integrate open stacks with big data and apps. The challenges and use cases for big data are varied. In the financial sector, credit card information for credit authorizations has been expanded from 30 days to 7 years through the use of Hadoop and Stream. In healthcare, neonatal tracking is helping to define patterns to identify oncoming infections. Pattern recognition is being adopted by the government for many activities.
The Watson system, most noted for its performance on Jeopardy, is now moving into commercial functions. Watson is based on open data and open APIs. It uses Linux on a Power 7 architecture server with two sockets to align with the X86 architecture. The efforts required an expansion of Linux on the Power 7 and demonstrates that Linux is capable of running on other platforms.
The use cases for big data include many industry applications. Open source enables infrastructure services and is being driven by many mandates. In Russia, the government is saying that all internal systems will be on Linux by ’15. The next change will be for all systems to be in an open stack architecture.
