Five Open Source Technologies for 2012 - stephenbuslow

Next twelvemonth, if complete goes accordant to plan, Cherry-red Hat will become the first open source software company to generate more than US$1 1000000000 a year in revenue. Information technology leave be a watershed moment for the give beginning biotic community, who have womb-to-tomb seen their access of community-based development as a viable, even superior, alternative to traditional notions of how software should exist cursive.

"I think we'Re seeing a fundamental shift in where instauratio happens, going from the labs of a few software system companies to these massive open source efforts," aforesaid Jim Whitehurst, Chief Executive and CEO of Reddish Chapeau.

Certainly, open source has left field the proprietary software program world in turmoil over the past few years, as Linux, the Apache Web waiter, Perl, Apache, Hadoop, OpenOffice, GIMP and piles of opposite programs put the taking into custody on their commercial counterparts. But what are tomorrow's open source heavy hitters? Here are five projects to watch closely in 2012. They may form the basis for new businesses and new industries. Or they may just capture the minds of developers and administrators with several easier, OR at least less expensive, way of getting the Book of Job done.

Nginx

For the better piece of the net decade, the choice for Net server computer software has been pretty stabile. Apache has been used on the majority of Net servers patc Microsoft's IIS (Net Information Services) is used crossways many of the repose. Finished the yore few years, however, use of a third starter, Nginx (pronounced "engine-x"), has been on the rise, thanks to the package's ability to well handle swollen-volume traffic.

Nginx is already incline on 50 million different Internet domains, or around 10 percent of the entire Internet, the developers of the software system underestimate. It is particularly widely used along highly trafficked Web sites, such As Facebook, Zappos, Groupon, Hulu, Dropbox, and WordPress. Not surprisingly, the software's creator, Igor Sysoev, designed Nginx in 2004 specifically to handle a large numbers of concurrent users — adequate 10,000 connections per server. "Information technology is a very lean computer architecture," same Andrew Alexeev, a conscientious objector-founder of a company that offers a dealings version of the software, called Nginx.

The upcoming year promises to be a good peerless for Nginx. Last year, Nginx got $3 billion in backing from a number of venture capital firms, including incomparable supported aside Dell CEO Michael Dell. It partnered with Jet-Stream to provide Nginx for that software marketer's CDN (message delivery net) package. It also is working with Amazon to streamline Nginx for the AWS (Amazon Web Avail) cloud service.

Beyond Nginx's exercise in large Web operations, Alexeev sees wider use for Nginx in the emerging cloud computing and shared services market. "This is where we can summate the most do good," Alexeev aforesaid. The next leading release of the software, due next year, will be more susceptible for divided up hosting environments. It testament be better able to handle DDoS (Distributed Demurrer of Service Attacks), and come with additional security features, he said.

OpenStack

The OpenStack project arrived relatively late to the cloud computing party, but information technology comes with single particularly indispensable feature: scalability.

"We'atomic number 75 non talking about [using OpenStack to run for a] cloud of 100 servers or even 1,000 servers, only tens of thousands of servers. Other options come out on that point aren't really considering that scale of measurement," said Jonathan Bryce, chairperson of the OpenStack Project Insurance policy Board.

Since its launch in July 2010, OpenStack speedily gained much of support from IT firms interested in the dapple computing space, such as Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Dingle. OpenStack devotees like to call their work the fastest growing open source project, with involution from over 144 companies and 2,100 participants. Dell launched a parcel, called the Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution, which combines OpenStack with the keep company's own servers and software program. H.P. launched a beta public cloud service with the technology as well.

The core computational components of OpenStack were developed at National Aeronautics and Space Administration Ames Research facility, for an internal cloud to store large amounts of space imaging. Originally, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration administrators tried victimization the Eucalyptus tree software package throw platform, but saved challenges in scaling the software to the required levels, according to Chris Kemp, who oversaw the development of the OpenStack cloud controller when he was CIO of NASA Ames.

To attention in wider adoption, OpenStack is being equipped with a total of newly features that should go far more palatable for enterprises, aforementioned John Engates, important technology officer for managed hosting provider Rackspace. One project, called Keystone, will allow organizations to integrate OpenStack with their identity operator management systems, those supported Microsoft Active Directory Beaver State other LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) implementations. Too, developers are working connected a front-end portal for the computer software as well. Rackspace, which prototypic partnered with National Aeronautics and Space Administration to package OpenStack for general usage, is also spinning off the project as a fully strong-minded stand-alone entity, in hopes that it will be an attractive option for more cloud providers.

"2011 was the year for edifice the base of the product, but I think 2012 is where we really start to use that base for a lot of private and public clouds," Engates same.

Stig

The past twelvemonth has seen the dramatic growth in the enjoyment of nonrelational databases, such as Cassandra, MongoDB, CouchDB and unnumberable others. But at the NoSQL Now league, held last September, much of the buzz surrounded a still unreleased data store titled Stig. With any luck, we will look Stig in 2012.

Stig is designed for the specific workloads of social networking sites, its maintainers claim. IT was created at the social networking locate Labelled away software program engineer Jason Lucas, who calls the technology a distributive graphical record database. It is designed to bear heavily interactive and social Web applications. The information store's architecture allows for deductive searching, allowing users and applications to search connections between disparate pieces of selective information. Because it was written, in part, in the Haskell functional programing language, IT can easily divide dormy its workload across multiple servers.

Stig is quiet a bit of a closed book, as it hasn't been really released yet. Merely observers are predicting it could go a ecological niche in the social networks and other applications that keep on a inaccurate kitchen stove of information. The needs of social networking services are inherently contrastive from other types of jobs, and would benefit from a database attuned to its needs, Lucas explained. "You can't be a relevant servicing in this space without being fit to scale to a planetal size," atomic number 2 said.

Stig is currently operating on one server at Tagged, though the company expects to expand its practice to the point where it will be the sole database for the troupe. Originally, the developers were planning to reservoir code by December, but moved back the release to old in 2012.

"What I did see looked very interesting," same Dan McCreary, a linguistics solutions architect for the Grace Kelly-McCreary & Associates consulting firm. He praised the database's in working order language architecture, which should ease the deployment of the database across multiple servers.

Linux Plenty

Despite years of protagonism along the part of open source adherents, Linux has never had a strong presence on the background. But usually there is always ane easy Linux distribution to usage, A an unconventional to Microsoft Windows. In recent years, Canonical's Ubuntu has fulfilled this role, though the progressively popular Linux Mint may trump Ubuntu by beingness justified easier to use.

Software railroad engineer Clement Lefebvre first crafted Linux Mint after a gig of reviewing opposite Linux distributions for various online forums. From this work, Lefebvre developed ideas about what features should be in the ideal distribution. Just as Canonical appropriated the Debian Linux distribution for its own massively popular Ubuntu, Lefebvre used Ubuntu as the base for Linux Mint. Today, the Linux Mint see is funded by donations, advertising revenue from its Website, and income derived from drug user searches, the last through a controversial partnership with DuckDuckGo.

Linux Mint is configured specifically for mass who only want a desktop OS, and who don't wish to determine more nigh how Linux industrial plant (i.e. non-Linux hobbyists). This approach makes installing and running the software easy and maintenance bad so much a nonissue. Steady more than Ubuntu, Mint emphasizes easy usability, at the expense of not using new features until they have established themselves trustworthy.

For instance, Mint eschews the somewhat controversial Unity background interface, which Law adoptive to to a greater extent easily port wine Ubuntu to mobile platforms. Instead, Plenty sticks with the more than widely known, and more than grownup, Gnome port.

Much strict attachment to usability may be helping Linux Mint, more than to the hurt of Ubuntu, in fact. The Linux Mint project claims its OS is forthwith the fourth most widely victimised desktop OS in the earthly concern, after Windows, Apple Mac and Ubuntu. Complete the past year, Mint has even usurped Ubuntu as the dispersion that generates the most page views on the DistroWatch Linux news site, a metric function generally thought to reflect the popularity of Linux distributions. No dubiety 2012 will see only more than growth for the Osmium.

Gluster

Could Red Lid inspire the world of reposition software in such the synoptic way it revolutionized the market for UNIX-supported OSes? In October, Bolshevik Chapeau purchased Gluster, which, with its GlusterFS Indian file system, makes outdoors source software that clusters commodity SATA (Serial Later Technology Attachment) drives and NAS (meshwork attached computer storage) systems into massively ascendible pools of storage. Red Lid plans to apply the method acting it used to command the market for Linux OSes for the depot space A well.

According to Cherry Hat's Whitehurst, the storage software market generates $4 billion in revenue annually, though that's not why the company was interested in the technology. Instead, Red Hat was interested in determination a storage engineering that would stimulate corrupt migrations easier. "We look for places where open source would be particularly powerful as a way to innovate, and we search areas in the stack where we think we can monetize," he aforesaid. "There are not other solutions like that out there."

The software has some impulse, leastways in terms of administrators downloading and testing the software. Over the agone year, GlusterFS downloads increased by 300 percentage. In November, the software was downloaded over 37,000 multiplication.

Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and unspecialised technology break news for The IDG Intelligence Service. Follow Joab on Chirrup at @Joab_Jackson. Joab's e-mail address is Joab_Jackson@idg.com