March 30, 2022

Cloud and Open Source

 

While developers may prefer open source solutions over closed, proprietary ones as they offer more ‘freedom’, they actually prefer the convenience of using open source software without requiring approval from a swathe of other business departments in their organisation. This has also started applying to cloud solutions, as open source providers are available in a timelier manner and in a non-preferential manner.

In order for multicloud to work, developers need tools that allow them to build with the best-in-class technologies that are also open – such as MongoDB or PostgreSQL. This is because these technologies can run across different cloud, data centre, and PC environments thus making it more convenient for a developer to use. A developer must be able to run these technologies in their vanilla format so that the application is portable across different cloud environments.

Open Source Initiative Logo

PostgreSQL, for example, is run on certain cloud providers but with additional patches and performance improvements. The vanilla version that anyone can download doesn’t have these features, but those enterprises with multicloud success have decided to use these battle-tested vanilla versions of open technologies to improve portability and convenience for developers.

Each cloud environment is different and using an open source technology that developers can carry between these solutions is extremely powerful. A developer that knows one of these technologies can be just as productive with AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. It is still important for a developer to know the intricacies of each cloud vendor, but these open source technologies allow developers to transfer their skills between these cloud environments.

So while cloud perfects many of the motives that developers first chose to work with open source, cloud has certainly not rendered open source extinct as previous commentators first imagined.

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