diane mueller

geyr-garmr:

Customers of Platform as a Service providers are unable to evaluate the risk of their provider going bankrupt. Lacking this information, businesses are effectively putting their critical business services in jeopardy. At the beginning of 2013, I co-authored a paper presenting a method to evaluate the PaaS ecosystem health based on GitHub data. It has since been accepted as a full research paper at the 4th International Conference on Software Business. This post will highlight some of our findings.

In business, Ecosystem Health is defined as the “the long-term financial well-being of the business ecosystem and the long-term strength of the network”[1]. Access to knowledge regarding ecosystem health is crucial for busi- nesses researching the possibility to move their software to the cloud for two reasons. To begin, businesses attempt to seek partners with a robust business ecosystem [2]. Second, the availability of their critical business applications re- lies on the robustness of their PaaS Provider. Unexpected bankruptcy of a PaaS provider can lead to loss of data or catastrophic downtime. Indications of these kinds of developments are preferably known beforehand. In the context of PaaS ecosystem health, the contributors to the long-term strength of the ecosystem are the direct users of the PaaS technology: developers. If a group of developers is actively contributing to the development of PaaS or its extensions, the PaaS itself is more likely to succeed in the long run.

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Three cloud evangelists walk up to the bar, one asked the bartender for a martini shaken not stirred, the other asked for a glass of tap water and the third asks for bottle of evian. Which one is working on Open Source?

The simplistic answer is “all of three” as there isn’t a cloud software initiative on the planet that doesn’t have some Open Source ingredients baked into it at multiple layers. 

But the real answer is much more complex and it’s one I’ve been mulling over for the past few months.

Going Open Source (again)

The cat’s out of the bag now and if you hadn’t heard about it, I’ve made the move to Red Hat to work in the Open Source world again.  Spending energies on building & supporting a closed source or proprietary Cloud initiatives no longer makes any sense to me. There’s been alot of good healthy writing going on this past month about the debate Open Source vs. Free which I highly recommend reading but that’s not a debate I’m wading into at the moment. 

When it comes to Cloud initiatives, whatever the layer or part of the tool chain being discussed, there’s an Open Source project out there for it. From IaaS, PaaS to SaaS: all the layers and the tool chains for managing and deploying Cloud have a growing contingent of Open Source options. Many of the initiatives are better than anything any one entity could have ever built on their own. That’s the power of community collaboration.

Whatever the excuse for going closed source in the cloud:  closed custom forks, tight-fisted governance models, protecting secret sauces, or bowing to the whims of VCs and “angel” investors to secure funding - the proprietary model doesn’t work anymore. The “OpenCloud” will “win” in the end as just as Linux has “won” the enterprise.  

Bottled Water Model is “Broken”

I always loved (and still do espouse) the “Bottled Water” business model of Quality Assured & Supported Open Source in which the “bottler” contributed heavily to the project that was being sanitized, extended and wrapped in fancy bottles. Don’t get me wrong, I still like to make money and I still think this model “works”.  But for the model to work, the “bottler” needs to be a truly engaged participant in the project and active in the community.  

It’s always been the key to the success of the “Bottle Water” model is that the “bottler” be able to contribute back in a meaningful way to the project they are bottling. These days this not always possible for the bottler as the variety of licenses that need to be adhered to, the supposedly benevolent dictatorships that tightly monitor who has design & commit privileges to projects, and corporate infighting that goes along with today’s heavily corporate sponsored open source bazaar - simply makes meaningful participation in some “Open Source” difficult, if not impossible 

Some of “bottlers” are simply end up redistributing tap water with the packaging that makes it easy to consume. Great packaging is awesome, but there’s still an obligation (IMHO) to give back to the community that’s filling the tap. 

When it’s not possible to do this, that’s when the “Bottle Water” business model fails.  It’s a failure of both the bottler & the project’s community . 

Innovation is more than a Flavor

Just look at the actual bottled water industry, with it’s bad rap for being less than eco-friendly, with bottled water being sold by corporate giants like Coca-Cola and Nestle pumped up with sugars, vitamins, fizz, color and energy supplements and marketed as something that will make you more powerful than a speeding bullet and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.

The same sort of explosion of flavors threatens to splinter the cloud into an inter-operablity nightmare as the PaaS marketplace enters the next stage.

Innovation that simply “flavors” the waters causing developers to choose the most “popular” PaaS with the best marketing campaigns, deploying their apps without understanding the ingredients that are being added will cause addictions and lock them into services & practices that will stunt their growth and fail to help them scale those tall buildings.

The RapGenius fiasco at Heroku is a good example of the collisions that arise when great hipster vibe early adopter marketing for decent proprietary product offering from a company with good intentions and great corporate values enabled a application development team to set aside the  responsibility for truly understanding what’s under the hood, reading the label, understanding the ingredients and knowing what their application was running on. Once the collision occurred, there was no venue other than twitter and the blog-o-sphere for the conversation between aggrieved parties to resolve their differences. No way to collaborate on a solution together.  

Contributing to an open source project is more than just packaging and adding flavors, it’s being able to contribute at the core design and architectural level. It’s creating the next generation of the project together and in consultation with the community not in a vacuum. Building communities that work is hard, creating eco-systems that support them and thrive takes lots of experience, communication,  openness - and it’s not a popularity contest. 

So why Red Hat?

History. Red Hat knows Open Source. Red Hat has an exceptional history of supporting and building communities around Open Source projects like Linux, JBoss, Fedora, Gluster and a myriad of others. As Red Hat steps up to the cloud with OpenShift Origin & OpenStack cloud initiatives, the Cloud shifts again to a more “Open” playing field.  

So when thinking about getting into the bottled water business, be sure to read the label, understand the ingredients, and learn everything you can about the community process that stands behind the tap - before you turn it on. 

And that’s why I’m drinking the Red Hat Kool-aid these days and the occasional martini. 

Today, as the Pope helicopters into the clouds out of the Vatican into retirement, I too will be landing in a new job as Cloud Ecosystem Evangelist at Red Hat. It’s sort of a surreal coincidence that it’s also the Pope’s last day on the job as well.

As luck would have it, I’ve stumbled upon a new opportunity in the Cloud and it is with some sadness I am leaving ActiveState yet again.

This has been my second Tour of Duty at ActiveState. The first one was with Dick Hardt in the pre-Sophos version of ActiveState and was a huge learning experience. This second tour of duty in the Cloudier version of ActiveState has been just as memorable albeit a bit longer in duration. Both rides were incredible. So it is again, I am leaving behind a team of friends and colleagues, rock stars all of them.

As we rocketed into the cloud over the past 3 years with Stackato, ActiveState has help me grow immensely as a developer, as an “open source” advocate, a writer, and as an person. PaaS put the fun back into being a developer and has brought me back to my open source roots and for that I am eternally grateful.

Adieu, ActiveState - I’m sure we’ll meet again!

Few things in life totally change your perspective on an Art form, reading Spiegelman’s Maus series of comic books changed my way of thinking about art, comics, history and perception itself.  As avid comic book reader all through my childhood, Maus showed me how an art form could be used to tell history, personal histories in a way that could reach audiences trained to avoid and escape reality. This is one show I won’t miss.

Art Spiegelman Co-Mix: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics and Scraps

February 16 to June 9, 2013 at Vancouver Art Gallery