Open Source Overview

Covid - The Case For Open Source Software

I am a child of the 1970's, I was born in the UK during a time of recession and remember bartering for the things that I wanted as a child. There have been multiple down turns of during my life time but the economic impact of Covid will dwarf all of those in scale. Companies and corporations will fail in many countries and those companies that survive will need to be leaner.

A favourite Sun-Tsu quote of mine is "In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity". The opportunity that I would suggest for cash strapped companies in a post Covid world would be the arena of open source software and systems. Most IT people will be well aware of every system that I mention in this article but perhaps non IT people are not and so it might be of use ? I will examine many open source areas like operating systems, databases through to functional systems like distributed storage.

Covid Shock - Impact On India

Over the last couple of decades India has emerged as the information technology hub of the world whilst at the same time being a country of over a billion people. The corporate work environment in India, in terms of IT, could be severely impacted by Covid due to the large volume of employees; Workers who can be crowded into office buildings by their thousands.

The disruption caused by the large scale infection of the work force in the Indian outsourcing companies will have a knock on impact on western corporations. Take the US investment banks as an example who have most of their support staff in Mumbai.

The graph above shows the new Covid cases in India as of May 2020 using data supplied by Wikipedia. The point I am trying to express is that this curve only shows new cases, it does not show totalled values. Even by showing the new case data above it is clear that the curve is non linear. I would suggest that India will encounter an exponential epidemic and so its support of the world's IT infrastructure will be impacted.

What can companies and corporations do in the face of strategic and economic impact ? The obvious answer given the curve above would be to immediately attempt to diversify their geographic emplyment structure whilst also start examining their software catalogue.

Whilst I cannot offer corporations advice on human resource issues as it is not my field I can make some suggestions regarding the open source world. This is what the rest of this article will expand upon. Although I would note that many major corporations lost staff through outsourcing to India in the last decade. Perhaps those staff could be enticed back for critical functions as India becomes chaotic ?

Software Purchasing Strategy

There is a definite preference for enterprise software purchases in the corporate world rather than open source systems for a number of reasons. Risk can be reduced through consultancy and support offered by enterprise software companies. Costs can be reduced by using out sourced low cost work forces or cloud based systems like PAAS ( Platform as a Service ) or IAAS ( Infrastructure as a Service ).

In a post Covid where banks, corporations and companies across multiple continents have failed liquidity will not be available to allow the choice of enterprise systems. Surviving enterprises will need to reduce costs and so free open source offerings will need to be considered. The next section will show examples of open source systems at various levels of the IT architecture.

To an experienced IT employee these names will not be a surprise, the point is that non IT people at a managerial level do not choose these offerings en mass. Collectively, using these examples, money can be saved and costs reduced.

Open Source Cost Benefits

So what are the benefits of open source systems ? If there are no down sides to open source systems why have companies large and small not migrated totally to these offerings ? This section will examine some of the benefits and issues involved.

Lower Costs

Open source systems are free to download, install and use. It is often possible to source a binary release as well as source code and documentation. Many offerings, especially from professional organisations like Apache ( apache.org ) offer documentation, startup guides, usage examples and a sense of confidence due to their professional approach.

Less Bugs

Because many of these open source systems have a wide user base, large communities and a history of releases there are generally less bugs. Open source systems generally have multiple contributors who develop and test their releases. Over time this process has been sucessful in providing reliable systems. Checkout the Apache ( apache.org ) incubator process and the Apache way. It might even be said that many commercial software projects should emulate Apache.

Community

Open source system development and usage fosters a sense of community both during the development process and later when new users can approach existing users to ask questions. This history of knowledge helps to drive the offering and make it more stable. It would be difficult for a single enterprise to offer the same free information flow.

Building Skills

The use of open source systems means that companies need to overcome technical hurdles involved with adoption. However, these issues allow companies to rediscover the old idea that it is very beneficial to grow a pool of skilled people within the organisation rather than to rely solely on outsourced resources. How many enterprises in the coming months will have senior managers scratching their heads as their Indian resources become unavailable ?

Vendor Lock In

Open Source systems avoid vendor lock in, they are free and there are no massive periodic licensing fees to pay or extra modules and training to buy. The lack of purchase and licensing fees in relation to open source systems allows the enterprise to be flexible in relation to current and future systems use and integration possibilities.

Greater Integration

Open source systems naturally lead to greater integration opportunities. This might be through design with client libraries being offered so that different systems can be connected. It might also be enabled by Apache projects like BigTop ( bigtop.apache.org ) which offer integration testing to ensure that systems will work together.

Issues Delaying Change

So if the points above paint such a rosy open source picture why have all companies big and small not migrated to the open source world completely ? Although open source systems are free there are technical hurdles involved in relation to adoption. For instance a higher level of technical ability and knowledge might be need to implement CentOS Linux as opposed to Windows 10. It would be easier to use the SQL Server database on Windows than the Postgresql database on CentOS Linux.

Open Source Opportunities 

This section will provide examples of open source offerings at various levels of the software stack as well as links to suppliers. It will lean towards distributed systems due to my background.

Operating Systems

There are many free open source operating systems available and I offer three examples without implying any superiority among these or those that I neglect. They are merely some example offerings to showcase the domain.

Ubuntu ( ubuntu.com ) , CentOS ( centos.org ) and Fedora ( getfedora.org ) are three example Linux based operating systems that offer a wide community, ease of install and a full windows interface.

Office Systems

Why pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars on Windows office systems like MS Office, Word, Excel and PowerPoint when free office systems like Open Office ( openoffice.org ) are available ? Open office is available on both Windows and Linux based platforms.

Databases

Why pay large sums to aquire and install Oracle system databases when free open source relational databases like Postgresql ( postgresql.org ) are available. Or if you need a large scale high volume distributed database then why not consider Cassandra ( cassandra.apache.org ) ? Im not suggesting that these offerings are as fully functional as an enterprise offering but they can be made to work. For instance Postgresql provides PSQL which can be used to write merge functions and so support data migration.

Data Movement And Migration

One of the major issues with large scale data migration and movement is end to end data security and the need for data flow monitoring. Apache Nifi ( nifi.apache.org ) is an open source offering which offers a distributed approach to data movement. It has a large range of integration possibilities, a central function for monitoring data movements and a repository which can be used to both guarantee data delivery and monitor movement history.

Distributed File Systems

The Apache Hadoop ( hadoop.apache.org ) HDFS - Hadoop Distributed File System is a well supported open source offering with a very large community. It offers the ability to host data sets at extreme scales from the Petabyte range and beyond. It also offers supporting functionality like data replication. Typically with open source systems like this it integrates well with associated systems like Apache Spark ( spark.apache.org ) for processing and Kafka ( kafka.apache.org ) for queueing.

Distributed Processing

As mentioned above Apache Spark ( spark.apache.org ) for processing distributed data sets in memory is another big data scale open source system that has been widely adopted. It offers support for data streaming, machine learning, in memory SQL and graph processing. It also has a wide range of included client libraries for integration purposes for instance Hadoop and Kafka clients.

Conclusion

There are hundreds of other open source system examples I could have chosen to make my point that open source systems are free and widely functional. You can build large scale enterprise systems from the component parts through careful integration. Your organisation can build competence over time and should consider this as a bonus rather than a chance to outsource.

In the coming months those organisations that have taken a singular outsourcing approach in regard to India may find themselves unable to operate. I hope that competent people are considering the potential impacts now rather than allowing disaster to strike before thinking to act.



Mike Frampton – May 2020