Ted Leung has some interesting ideas about Platform As a Service (PaaS) and open source. I agree with Ted that open source software is not becoming any less relevant. Looking at current platform as a service offerings Ted’s view of,
The more interesting question for developers has to do with infrastructure software. In my mind LAMP is really a proxy for “infrastructure software” If you’ve been paying any attention at all to the development of web application software, you know that there is a lot happening with various kinds of infrastructure software.
is understandable. Almost all the current PaaS vendors have developed mechanisms to harvest commons based peer production. Ultimately all of this ends up in some server of a vendor locked away in a data center somewhere. Most of the vendors use open source software heavily for their PaaS offerings and some have open sourced bits and pieces of their platform. While I’m certainly not the overzealous freedom fighter I was, this awfully sounds like writing open source applications for a proprietary platform. Not that it’s necessarily a bad thing. Unlike developing software on a proprietary operating system, developing on a proprietary platform as a service offering is limited in various aspects which are unique to its usecase.
So, IMHO, a more interesting problem to tackle in an environment like this is open source platform as a service. You still have a hosted service where people can just develop applications and forget about underlying technical details of the platform, where your data is residing and so on. At the same time this entire platform is open source! Sounds like a pipe dream but it’s a reality. I hope this will set a trend that other vendors follow, eventually.
The open source platform as a service is Stratos. The hosted platform reside in cloud.wso2.com where anyone can register for free (during the alpha and beta stages) and get an entire middleware platform at your fingertips with a few clicks. Another bold move is that the code base of the downloadable version and the hosted version are exactly the same! So, the platform itself and hosted applications behave in a predictable manner where ever they’re deployed. Also, it should be mentioned here that most of the services provided by Stratos started their life as standalone programs (like Tomcat). This also, provide invaluable repository of information if anyone wants to study how their should architect their applications to make them cloud native. Source code for the entire platform available here.