Open Source First Starting to Converge with Cloud First

With a large contingent of the open source community gathering this week at the LinuxCon conference there are two trends that are clearly starting to converge in a way where the sum of the parts is much greater than the whole.

The first involves the shift toward an “open source first” mentality among enterprise IT organization that would rather spend money on developing their own engineering talent than pay for commercial support. The second has been the rapid shift to the cloud; with many organizations now adopting a “cloud first” mentality to complement an existing “open source first” mantra.

The end result is a critical mass of open source software that is starting to build in the cloud. In fact, Ed Boyajian, CEO of EnterpriseDB, a provider of a commercially supported instance of the open source PostgreSQL database, contends it’s now only a matter of time before hybrid cloud computing deployments wind up driving more open source adoption on premise as well.

Right now two of the world’s largest cloud service providers are driving database-as-a-service (DBaaS) adoptions using PostgreSQL. In the case of Amazon Web Services (AWS), the Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL provides access to up to 3TB per database instance. Taking a different route to achieve much the same goal, Aliyun, the cloud arm of the Asian e-commerce giant Allibaba, has partnered with EnterpriseDB to create a cloud service around the instance of PostgreSQL supported by EnterpriseDB.

Boyajian says there are two major factors driving increased adoption of PostgreSQL that have to do with Oracle. The first is that as a database that is compatible with Oracle applications many IT organizations are increasingly comfortable with shifting both existing and new application development work to an open source database in the cloud that is less expensive to use. The second stems from the acquisition of the open source database MySQL by Oracle. Initially widely adopted by developers to drive Web applications, Boyajian says that many developers have shifted their allegiance to an open source database that is not owned by a corporate entity. Couple that with the work AWS has been doing to promote adoption of PostgreSQL and the weight of Alijun and Boyajian said there is clearly something akin to a PostgreSQL movement in the cloud underway.

Of course, PostgeSQL is only one instance where open source and the cloud are starting to converge. The same argument could also be applied to everything from Node.js to Docker containers. The point is that as the critical mass of open source software in the cloud continues to build, it’s only a matter of time before that same software starts showing up on premise in much greater numbers than it already has.