Open source projects are all the rage, with even the largest proprietary tech vendors wanting to label themselves as ‘open source’.
The growth of open source projects can be attributed to a number of different factors, including speed of development and avoiding vendor lock-in.
Often two heads are better than one, or thousands of developer heads are better than a few. However you want to look at it, open source projects bring together brilliant minds that may not have had an opportunity otherwise to work together.
CBR rounds up five brilliant open source projects.
1. Apache Hadoop
Hadoop has become so entwined with Big Data that people find it difficult to separate them. It isn’t one thing, but many, and this list isn’t the space for attempting to fully explain it.
Basically it is an open source software framework for storage and large scale processing of data-sets.
Involved in this space are Hortonworks, Cloudera, Teradata and many others. A vast amount of companies offer solutions that integrate with the technology, highlighting its significance in the market.
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2. Kubernetes
Coming from Google and often seen as a development of its own Borg technology, the Kubernetes project, which I am pronouncing coo-bear-netties, is gaining a lot of interest.
It aims to provide high availability and replication, service discovery and service aggregation.
The technology has some heavyweight support in the shape of Intel, IBM, Red Hat and VMware. A foundation called the Cloud Native Computing Foundation supports the development of it.
Kubernetes was developed to allow large applications to be split across multiple containers, with its job as a container orchestration platform.
3. OpenStack
An open community made up of tech heavyweights such as Rackspace, IBM, Mirantis, Red Hat, HP and many others.
These companies contribute to the OpenStack democracy in order further advance the software tools that are designed to build and manage cloud platforms.
Considered to be possibly the future of cloud computing, with help from the likes of Intel, it is gradually becoming more enterprise ready.
4. Drupal
Drupal is an open source content management platform that powers websites and applications. It is supported and built by an active community around the world.
It has over one million users and developers and is distributed under the terms of the General Public License.
The benefit of this free to use software means the community is continuously working on developing it to be the best it can be.
5. Docker
The application container platform can be credited with making containers more visible to the market.
The technology had been around for a while, but Docker perhaps made it more accessible to the community following its 2013 open sourcing.
Docker containers help you to guarantee that your software will run the same, regardless of the environment you run it in.
A large amount of companies have integrated it with their offerings or offer support, such as Oracle, CA Technologies and AWS.
