Category Archives: Open Source

Apple, News & Analysis, Open Source, Swift

Apple opens sources Swift programming language

Apple SwiftApple has made its Swift programming language open source in a bid to invite more contributions from developers.

According to Apple community website 9to5Mac, developers have been reluctant to commit to a relatively new language whose code base may disappear at the whim of its monopolist owner. Though it was only introduced in 2014, Swift is the fastest growing programming language in history. According to analyst Redmonk’s Programming Language Rankings, June 2015 report, Swift has “the performance and efficiency of compiled languages and the simplicity and interactivity of popular scripting languages”.

As an open source language, Apple said, a broad community of developers from education institutions to enterprises could contribute new Swift features and help bring it to new computing platforms.

The Swift open source code is available via GitHub and includes support for Apple’s iOS, OS X, watchOS and tvOS software platforms as well as Linux. Components available include the Swift compiler, debugger, standard library, foundation libraries, package manager and REPL. Swift is licensed under the Apache 2.0 open source license with a runtime library exception, meaning users can incorporate Swift into their own software and port the language to new platforms.

In support Apple has published a web site, Swift.org, which explains Swift open source with technical documents, community resources and links to download the Swift source code.

“Swift’s power and ease of use will inspire a new generation to get into coding and take their ideas anywhere, from mobile devices to the cloud,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior VP of Software Engineering, “By making Swift open source the entire developer community can bring it to even more platforms.”

Apple’s Swift team has now posted source code for the Swift compiler and standard library functions and objects.

IBM, Machine learning, Networks, News & Analysis, Open Source, SystemML

IBM open-sources machine learning SystemML

Machine 2 MachineIBM is aiming to popularise its proprietary machine learning programme SystemML through open-source communities.

Announcing the decision to share the system source code on the company blog, IBM’s Analytics VP Rob Thomas said application developers are in need of a good translator. This was a reference to the huge challenges developers face when combining information from different sources into data-heavy applications on a variety of computers, said Thomas. It is also a reference to the transformation of a little used proprietary IBM system into a popular, widely adopted artificial intelligence tool for the big data market. The vehicle for this transformation, according to Thomas, will be the open-source community.

IBM claims SystemML is now freely available to share and modify through the Apache Software Foundation open-source organisation. Apache, which manages 150 open-source projects, represents the first step to widespread adoption, Thomas said. The new Apache Incubator project will be code named Apache SystemML.

The machine learning platform originally came out of IBM’s Almaden research lab ten years ago when IBM was looking for ways to simplify the creation of customized machine-learning software, Mr. Thomas said. Now that it is in the public domain, it could be used by a developer of cloud based services to create risk-modeling and fraud prevention software for the financial services industry, Thomas said.

The current version of SystemML could work well with Apache project Spark, Thomas said, since this is designed for processing large amounts of data that stream in from continuous sources like monitors and smartphones. SystemML will save companies valuable time by allowing developers to write a single machine learning algorithm and automatically scale it up using open-source data analytics tools Spark and Hadoop.

MLLib, the machine learning library for Spark, provides developers with a rich set of machine learning algorithms, according to Thomas, and SystemML enables developers to translate those algorithms so they can easily digest different kinds of data and to run on different kinds of computers.

“We believe that Apache Spark is the most important new open-source project in a decade. We’re embedding Spark into our Analytics and Commerce platforms, offering Spark as a service on IBM Cloud, and putting more than 3,500 IBM researchers and developers to work on Spark-related projects,” said Thomas.

While other tech companies have open-sourced machine learning technologies they are generally niche specialised tools to train neural networks. IBM aims to popularise machine learning within Spark or Hadoop and its ubiquity will be critical in the long run, said Thomas.

containers, Interviews, Open Source, Yelp

Containers aren’t new, but ecosystem growth has driven development

kyle andersonContainers are getting a fair bit of hype at the moment, and February 2016 will see the first ever dedicated container-based conference take place in Silicon Valley in the US. Here, Business Cloud News talks to Kyle Anderson, who is the lead developer for Yelp, to learn about the company’s use of containers, and whether containers will ultimately live up to all the hype.

Business Cloud News: “What special demands does Yelp’s business put on its internal computing?”

Kyle Anderson: “I wouldn’t say they are very special. In some sense our computing demands are boring. We need standard things like capacity, scaling, and speed. But boring doesn’t quite cut it though, and if you can turn your boring compute needs into something that is a cut above the status quo, it can become a business advantage.”

BCN: “And what was the background to building your own container-based PaaS? What was the decision-making process there?”

KA: “Building our own container-based PaaS came from a vision that things could be better if they were in containers and could be scheduled on-demand.

“Ideas started bubbling internally until we decided to “just build it” with manager support. We knew that containers were going to be the future, not VMS. At the same time, we evaluated what was out there and wrote down what it was that we wanted in a PaaS, and saw the gap. The decision-making process there was just internal to the team, as most engineers at Yelp are trusted to make their own technical decisions.”

BCN: “How did you come to make the decision to open-source it?”

KA: “Many engineers have the desire to open-source things, often simply because they are proud of their work and want to share it with their peers.

“At the same time, management likes open-source because it increases brand awareness and serves as a recruiting tool. It was natural progression for us. I tried to emphasise that it needs to work for Yelp first, and after one and a half years in production, we were confident that it was a good time to announce it.”

BCN: “There’s a lot of hype around containers, with some even suggesting this could be the biggest change in computing since client-server architecture. Where do you stand on its wider significance?

KA: “Saying it’s the biggest change in computing since client-server architecture is very exaggerated. I am very anti-hype. Containers are not new, they just have enough ecosystem built up around them now, to the point where they become a viable option for the community at large.”

Container World is taking place on 16 – 18 February 2016 at the Santa Clara Convention Center, CA, USA.

Big Data, Enterprise IT, Huawei, News & Analysis, Open Source, SAP HANA, Telco Cloud

Huawei shows how FusionSphere runs SAP HANA

SAP HANA VoraSAP partner and telecoms equipment maker Huawei used the SAP TechEd conference in Barcelona to demonstrate how its FusionSphere operating system handles SAP’s HANA big data processing platform on Huawei hardware.

Huawei’s FusionSphere is an open, enterprise-level cloud operating system based on OpenStack architecture. The telecoms equipment maker says it integrates software-defined computing, storage, networking and cloud management components into one system that can support private, public, and hybrid clouds. Delegates at the SAP conference were invited to see demonstrations of how the ‘open and agile’ operating system could handle running enterprise software.

Huawei argued that since FusionSphere can run business applications that have traditionally been run ‘on premise’, it will create new opportunities for mass processing of big data on the cloud. With the economies of scale and greater choice over resources that cloud gives the managers of IT operations, purchasers of IT services will have much greater buying power, according to Huawei.

Consequently, it argued, cloud based HANA projects could be run at much lower capital and operating costs, with more efficiency and service quality.

Huawei became a SAP global technology partner in 2012. Since then it has supported the SAP HANA platform and associated applications via a series of other products alongside FusionServer, with one, the Huawei Appliance for SAP HANA, currently being used in China, Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, Huawei used the Linux-oriented OPNFV Summit to unveil its new inventions for OPNFV Mobile Networking.

Huawei Chief Technology Officer Pang Kang told the conference the next generation of mobile architecture will be built on an open source version of NFV (network functions virtualisation).

“The OPNFV platform will be a significant step in the move to a new mobile architecture that scales, is elastic, resilient and agile,” said Pang Kang. “A carrier grade virtual infrastructure will help Huawei deliver the next-generation in mobile networking to our customers.”

Among the projects that Huawei is contributing to, within the OPNFV organisation, is Pinpoint – a big data system for failure prediction and Multi-site Virtualized Infrastructure, a distributed architecture for OPNFV.

During the OPNFV Summit, Huawei will demonstrate three OPNFV-based solutions that are targeted for commercial deployment, VNFs over OPNFV, VTN of ONOS (a carrier grade open source SDN controller) for OPNFV and Compass for OPNFV, a DevOps tool.

API, Linux Foundation, News & Analysis, Open Source, smart building

Linux Foundation wants to extend Swagger in connected buildings

smart cityMembers of the Linux Foundation have met in San Francisco to push its newly announced Open API initiative. The collective want to harmonise efforts in the development of connected building technology.

Founding members of the Open API Initiative, including Google, IBM, Intuit, Microsoft and PayPal, want to extend the range of Swagger, the popular framework for building application programming interfaces (APIs). Their collective ambition is to create a vendor neutral, portable and open specification for providing metadata for APIs based on the representational state architecture (REST).

A new open specification could let humans and computers discover and understand the potential of their proposed connected building services with minimal implementation logic. The Initiative will also promote the use of an open API standard.

Swagger, created in 2010 and offered as an open source license a year later, is a description format used by developers in a broad range of industries. It’s used to design and deliver APIs that support a variety of connected applications and services. Downloads of Swagger and Swagger tooling have tripled in the last year as it became the most popular open source framework for defining and creating RESTful APIs.

SmartBear recently acquired the Swagger API open source project from Reverb Technologies and today is working with its industry peers to ensure the specification and format can continue to evolve. The open governance model for the Open API Initiative includes a Technical Developer Committee (TDC) that will manage the specification and keep users abreast of developments.

“Swagger is considered one of the most popular frameworks for building APIs. When an open source project reaches this level of maturity, it just can’t be managed by one entity,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation. “The Open API Initiative will extend this technology to advance connected application development through open standards.”

Helion, HP, hybrid cloud, News & Analysis, Open Source, OpenStack

Second coming of HP Helion OpenStack will concentrate on hybrids

HP has unveiled its latest incarnation of HP Helion OpenStack with a demonstration of Version 2.0 at the OpenStack Summit 2015 in Tokyo.

After it recently announced the imminent closure of its OpenStack driven public cloud offering, the vendor is thought to be concentrating its efforts to help enterprise clients cope with the challenge of straddling private and hybrid cloud environments. This, according to analyst IDC, is the biggest market in the industry with $118 billion of business being generated in 2015.

HP said it has marshalled all the resources withdrawn from the public cloud and sent them to fight on the Hybrid cloud front. The numbers will help the vendor establish confidence among its enterprise customers, according to Bill Hilf, the general manager of HP’s cloud division. “Customers want to put OpenStack technology into production with the confidence that they are backed by the experience and support of a trusted end-to-end technology partner,” said Hilf.

From a technical perspective, the HP platform will be easier to use, said Hilf. In the new version of Helion, created out of the OpenStack Kilo stable, laying on new infrastructure will be a lot easier for system builders and CIOs, he said. The cost of ownership will be lowered, and projects will advance quicker, thanks to a much more user-friendly administrator interface. The problems of integrating different clouds into one hybrid will be easier to confront now, Hilf told the OpenStack Summit audience, because HP is instilling an internal policy of strict adherence to OpenStack application programme interface (API) standards in a bid to speed up cross-cloud compatibility.

HP also claimed that Helion OpenStack 2.0 will allow customers to create and manage software defined networks (SDN) in a distributed, multi-datacentre environment through integration with HP Distributed Cloud Networking (DCN) and Nuage Networks’ Virtualized Services Platform. This, it claims, removes the boundaries of traditional networking and unlocks the full automation and liquidity needed for running a proper hybrid cloud.

News & Analysis, Open Source, OpensStack, Project Navigator

OpenStack claims Project Navigator will lead adopters through development hell

openstack tokyo summitThe OpenStack Foundation’s chief operating office Mark Collier has lifted the lid on Project Navigator, a scheme to help users see their way through the myriad of component projects, different levels of software maturity and documentation involved in taking part in the project.

The involvement of 200 vendors in the open source project is both a strength and a weakness in such a large complex community with diverse projects, according to Collier, speaking at the OpenStack developer conference. Project Navigator aims to help companies chart a course more easily, he said.

“It’s good to have options but it can be overwhelming,” said Collier, “we have over two dozen different services now that you can put into production. There’s a small number of projects that every cloud uses, but there are quite a few projects that give you optional services.”

These days users need help in making sense of the various projects before they can progress, said Collier. The project aims to offer intelligence, drawn from a number of sources, to help them make quicker and faster decisions.

Users know a little about a lot of projects but can rarely have complete information, Collier said. In response, the foundation has gathered metadata about various projects, on everything from their breadth of adoption to the documentation to the age and will publish this on its web site.

Collier admitted this would be a best effort. “We can’t fly everywhere and talk to everyone. It makes more sense to distil it down and make it digestible online,” said Collier.

The objective of the Navigator tool is to educate users about the core set of services that they’ll need in any cloud and provide a clear delineation between those and the services that are optional.

In a related support development, the OpenStack Foundation announced the launch of a certification program for OpenStack cloud admins. Like Project Navigator, the scheme is a formal recognition of the growing complexity of OpenStack. The large number of sub-projects make it hard for businesses to find qualified administrators before they can adopt the technology.

OpenStack COO Mark Collier said similar certifications are planned for OpenStack developers and other roles in the project.

China, Mirantis, News & Analysis, Open Source, OpenStack, UCloud

Mirantis and UCloud in joint bid to tap massive potential of Chinese cloud market

ChinaSoftware and services vendor Mirantis and Chinese cloud operator UCloud have announced a joint venture to speed OpenStack adoption in China’s finance, telecom, state-owned enterprises and large internet businesses.

The venture, dubbed UMCloud, will be led by UCloud CEO and founder Xinhua Ji with head offices in Shanghai, China.

Investment in cloud computing infrastructure in China is estimated by consultancy Bain & Company to be growing faster than overall IT spending and projected to reach $20 billion by 2020, a compound annual growth rate of 40% to 45%. In 2014, China had more than 640 million internet users – more than the USA, India and Japan combined. In 2013, smartphone use in China exceeded 700 million units and 530 million of these Chinese smartphone users accessed the internet from their mobile device.

Cloud computing is a national strategic policy and the government included it in the nation’s 12th Five-Year Plan. Last December, the Ministry of Industry and Information (MIIT) officially declared its intention to support OpenStack ecosystems and to encourage state-owned enterprises to use OpenStack-based cloud products.

California based software and service vendor Mirantis is described as pure-play OpenStack company with installations at AT&T, Ericsson, Walmart and Wells Fargo. It has been funded by a quarter of a billion dollars in venture capital since 2012 and is the second highest contributor of open source software code to OpenStack. Mirantis’ Chinese clients include telco hardware makers Jiesai, Huawei and ZTE.

UCloud is China’s top independent public cloud service provider with clients using e-commerce, gaming, mobile internet and SaaS services, from data centres in China, Hong Kong and the US. The company announced a $100 million Series C financing round in April, with $160 million raised to date.

“China and the United States are two countries where cloud computing is developing the fastest,” said Alex Freedland, president and co-founder of Mirantis, “we see unlimited potential for OpenStack as a major cloud engine in China.”

Akanda, Astara, Liberty, News & Analysis, Open Source, OpenStack

Astara is born to simplify networking for OpenStack Liberty, claims Akanda

opensourceSystems built on OpenStack now have better management options, according to Akanda, which has unveiled its new Astara Liberty system for network orchestration.

Akanda, which contributed to the recently launched OpenStack Project Astara, announced the new Liberty release at OpenStack Summit Tokyo. The new Astara Liberty release is Akanda’s debut contribution to the project. The makers claims it gives OpenStack operators vendor-agnostic network orchestration platform for everything that lies between layers three and seven on the network services stack.

The design criteria for Liberty is to cut complexity and make Neutron implementations more scalable. It achieves this by dispensing with the need for multiple plugins and software defined networking (SDN) controllers. By orchestrating these network functions from different providers on bare metal, virtual machines and containers, it has given cloud developers more options and more stability, claims Akanda.

These ‘scalability, flexibility and stability’ improvements are achieved because Akanda’s Liberty release gives developers more configuration choices, faster provisioning, smoother integration, higher levels of availability and fuller compatibility, claims the vendor. Among the mechanisms for delivering these improvements are a new type of new load balancer driver, more Neutron resources and Cumulus Networks integration and support for Dynamic Lightweight Network Virtualization.

“The goal of Astara is to make Networking and DevOps’ lives easier,” said Akanda CEO Henrik Rosendahl. The culture of traditional and expensive single vendor lock-ins must be replaced by a massively simplified OpenStack networking range, he said.

The Liberty release demonstrates the power of the big tent approach to OpenStack, claimed Simon Anderson, CEO of DreamHost and OpenStack Foundation board member. “It’s fantastic to see new open source projects extend and simplify the platform,” said Anderson.

Ansible, M&A, News & Analysis, Open Source, RedHat

RedHat to buy DevOps specialist Ansible

Cloud in my handOpen source vendor RedHat has announcement an agreement to buy DevOps specialist Ansible, which creates agentless automation systems designed to simplify the automation of pure and across hybrid cloud environments.

The upstream Ansible open source automation projects on GitHub have an active community of 1,200 contributors and Ansible automation is used by Fortune 100 companies to power large and complex private cloud environments. In 2015 it was granted the InfoWorld Bossie Award in recognition of being the best open source datacentre and cloud software on the market.

Ansible removes some of the most significant barriers to automation across IT, according to Joe Fitzgerald vice president of management at Red Hat. Adding Ansible to Red Hat’s hybrid management portfolio means customers can install and manage cloud applications more easily, use DevOps to improve service delivery, streamline OpenStack projects and make container adoption much easer to orchestrate and configure.

Acquiring the top IT automation and DevOps company will take Red Hat significantly closer to frictionless IT, according to Fitzgerald, but innovation has to be 100 per cent open source and built on open management. “Ansible can help us relentlessly focus on reducing cost and complexity through ease of use and automation,” said Fitzgerald.

The addition of Ansible to Red Hat’s portfolio puts it at the forefront of cloud and DevOps, according to venture capitalist Doug Carlisle, MD of Menlo Ventures.

The acquisition, which will close in October if all conditions are met, won’t affect Red Hat’s revenue for the third and fourth quarters of its fiscal year ending on February 29, 2016. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but VentureBeat reckons the price was over $100 million.

Management expects that non-GAAP operating expenses for fiscal 2016 will increase by approximately $2.0 million, or ($0.01) per share, in the third quarter and approximately $4.0 million, or ($0.02) per share, in the fourth quarter as a result of the transaction.

According to researcher IDC’s analysis in July 2015, the global cloud systems management software market achieved total revenue of $2.3 billion in 2014. The market is currently forecast to grow to $8.3 billion in 2019.