Open source has become an integral piece of every developer’s arsenal. The power of the community, the wisdom of many and the ability to hook into various systems and solutions make open source incredibly powerful.
We all often contribute to and embrace open source solutions and provide APIs to empower developers to integrate their tools into our systems. We also regularly keep our finger on the pulse of what is happening in the open source community. Hence, here we identify how open source is bearing the impact of some key trends.
ADC space embraces open source
The vendors of application delivery controller (ADC) are all set to start providing better and tighter integration packages for various open source projects, especially surrounding ADC-generated telemetry.
More eyes find vulnerabilities in open source projects
Bad guys love them and companies hate them! Many companies leverage open-source technologies to help build enterprise-class and cloud-ready solutions. However, with open source vulnerabilities making headline impacting news, open source projects are not as trustworthy as they have historically been perceived. Technology vendors, as they push to gain mind share as security companies, will start to identify vulnerabilities in open source code more often. This will hopefully lead to patches being produced sooner.
Data becomes more actionable as business intelligence rises
Collecting mountains of data is great. But this is what you do with that data and what you learn from it that matters. We have been so caught up in collecting the data that we are not using the data we collect.
Companies have been using analytics and machine learning extensively to get more value out of the data collected and identifying actionable patterns. This has acted as a fuel for increasing business intelligence and that in turn would give organisations a competitive advantage.
This year is turning out to be a year of information superiority with businesses using data as a key differentiator.
Containers become more common
For the past two or three years, containers have been more of an edge fad than a mass-adopted solution. That seemed to have changed lately.
The focus of businesses now has been on rightsising of their resources. Containers give businesses the ability to leverage highly portable assets or resources and make the move into microservices much easier. This improves the scalability and stability of applications at a price that is easier for organisations to swallow.
Enterprise DevOps adoption intensifies
Until recently, DevOps stymied the enterprise. They knew they needed to adopt this new skillset and the principles that come with it, but through a lack of available talent and ambiguous definitions, they’ve been left a bit in the dark.
As DevOps tools and processes become more mainstream, enterprises have been able to take advantage of DevOps and break down the barriers between developers and IT.
Automation. Automation. Automation
Automation has become more important now. Mainly fueled by enterprise DevOps adoption, the automation of software delivery and infrastructure changes have freed developers to spend more time creating and less time worrying about infrastructure. Development teams want to leverage large amounts of powerful software quickly; improved automation allows this.
Service providers leverage OpenStack
OpenStack’s maturity, combined with its inherent cost savings, will drive more service providers to deploy it as their open source software of choice to power private and public clouds. OpenStack makes it easier and cheaper for service providers to hire developers to build what they need rather than buying a bulky proprietary solution and making limited customisations.
Hundreds of companies already use OpenStack to control their compute, storage and networking resources and its friendliness with heterogeneous infrastructure makes it an ideal solution for service providers who do not want to be tied to a single cloud solution. OpenStack will be a strong contender in the service provider market for years to come.
Enterprises look toward public clouds
For most enterprises, their main focus is not technology. Businesses want turnkey offerings versus customised and specialised solutions. Hence, enterprises are leaning more heavily on public cloud providers now which will only increase shortly.
Common Service APIs grow in importance
APIs have been an integral part of open source for a while, and the need for good quality APIs keeps increasing. Smooth and easy integrations fuel swift implementations and open the door to speedy, feature rich deployments. Vendors who do not focus on providing good APIs will miss out in the future.
Open-source projects will continue to emerge to further development using RESTful APIs, which deliver application back-end services and other functionality.
Architectures get more standardised
The implementation of frameworks will make most infrastructures look the same, which will lead to cloud infrastructure looking similar because the underlying infrastructure is more services-based versus network topology. For businesses, this means they will care less about the infrastructure itself and more about the services that power it.
These are just some of the trends that will have an impact on open source. Certainly, several more trends and movements are likely to emerge from this community-driven world in the coming future.
