
Five Things OpenStack Needs to Do … Now.
At the most recent OpenStack SV 2015 event, I was invited to speak and provide a viewpoint on OpenStack’s future. The year before in 2014 I gave a talk entitled “Lie of the Benevolent Dictator” which spawned the Product Working Group for OpenStack. A blog posting entitled The Future of OpenStack is Now, 2015 in […]

Amazon iterates, Google partners
Positive cloudy news from two of the big three, with Amazon Web Services (AWS) making some significant improvements to their DynamoDB service and Google signing on as a sponsor of the OpenStack cloud platform. AWS has got this incremental improvement thing down to a fine art, to the extent that too many competitors have stopped […]

Money for IaaS, money for streaming data
$83 million for Digital Ocean, with its bare-bones spin on cloud-based infrastructure… and $24 million for Confluent, the company behind Apache Kafka. Digital Ocean’s not an AWS-killer (and doesn’t think it is, either), and Kafka addresses a rather specific set of use cases around messaging between devices and/or application components… but both are solid pieces of […]

Project CoprHD’s Architecture
Unless you had your head in the sand, you probably saw my blog post talking about Project CoprHD (“copperhead”), EMC’s first open source product. Exciting times are ahead when one of the world’s largest enterprise vendors embraces open source in a big way. Does it get any bigger than picking your flagship software-defined storage (SDS) […]

Open Source Software and the US Government
Open Source Software and the US Government: “…it has been determined that — in general — Members and staff in the U.S. House of Representatives, when conducting official business, now have a choice between using proprietary and closed technology and open source solutions that are restriction-free, reusable and frequently more cost-effective.” That this is news, […]

Introducing CoprHD (“copperhead”), the Cornerstone of a Software-Defined Future
You’ve probably been wondering what I’ve been working on post-acquisition and yesterday you saw some of the fruits of my (and many others) labor in the CoprHD announcement. CoprHD, pronounced “copperhead” like the snake, is EMC’s first ever open source product. That EMC would announce open sourcing a product is probably as big a surprise […]

Software Load Testing: A Perfect Match for the Cloud
The cloud has allowed modern, web-scale IT companies, like Airbnb and Netflix, to grow and flourish into booming enterprises all over the web. With its flexibility and efficiency, it supports the demand of an organization’s growth from zero to millions of users, allowing them to prepare for this potential growth, as well. Before the cloud, […]

What’s in a name in open source?
What does community mean to you?
Community is an overloaded word, it can mean anything. Community can mean just people who use your product. Or maybe it’s those who build your product, or maybe it’s the business partners who are using it. Or maybe it’s…

Keys to turn your open source project into a business
Broadly speaking, there are two types of open source software. The free software, which has a reciprocity requirement in it. Open source software which doesn’t.

Open source history, present day, and licensing
This article is part of my talk, Open-Source Business Models. You can see the full transcript and the video of my talk on Heavybit.com. My name is Marten Mickos and I’m the CEO of Eucalyptus Systems. As Tom mentioned, I was the CEO of MySQL for eight years. I was de facto the only CEO […]

Architectural PaaS Cracks or Crack PaaS
Over the last couple years there have been two prominent open source PaaS Solutions come onto the market. Cloud Foundry & OpenShift. There’s been a lot of talk about these plays and the talk has slowly but steadily turned into traction. Large enterprises are picking these up and giving their developers and operations staff a …

Write the Docs, Railsconf Portland, RICON East, Node PDX, Vancouver Polyglot, Open Source Bridge and OSCON…
…if you are deciding what to attend this year, here’s the top of the list. Just a few key conferences that will kick ass in technical & academic content. The other great thing about these conferences is that they either have a “code of ethics” or are reknown for real conference diversity vs. the “hey […]

OpenStack Infighting: Will It Affect The Project?
It has been 2+ years since OpenStack was launched and the project is slowly maturing as organizations are exploring the use of OpenStack for their private cloud needs. As money gets into the ecosystem, it is natural for bickering to start among the ecosystem players. In fact, naysayers of the project has been saying this […]

Open Source Metrics: Let Us Get Realistic
Recently a blogger wrote an article comparing the mailing list interaction in the communities around major open source infrastructure projects. It is a personal project by a blogger using various data sources available in the internet. But the post kickstarted discussion among the punditry talking about whether OpenStack or CloudStack is the top ranking infrastructure […]

CloudFoundry Core May Not Be Important But CloudFoundry Is Important
Two weeks back I wrote a post arguing that CloudFoundry Core is not important. I had argued that even though CloudFoundry Core is done with an intention to make application portability seamless across various CloudFoundry deployments, the business considerations of PaaS vendors in the ecosystem will ensure that application portability is not a given. The […]