There’s a real explosion of cloud platforms and management tools, it seems you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting one these days. In the commercial proprietary solutions space you have – CA’s 3Terra AppLogic, Enomaly, Nimbula, RightScale. In open source there are Eucalyptus, Cloud.com, Open Nebula and …

For the last few years I have had an interest in configuration management of IT infrastructure. While by no means an expert I have a considerable amount of experience with the problems associated with mass server configuration and have come to believe it also one of the most under-served disciplines in systems management.

In a previous life I had an operations role maintaining primarily Linux servers and other open source infrastructure. In 2006 I worked on launching the open source NetDirector project, a graphical tool for configuring open source infrastructure like Apache, Samba, LDAP and NFS servers. During that time the challenges of …

How do you build one of the busiest websites on the Internet? You wouldn’t guess the right answer to be, “You download some free software and hack  it”…Actually  the question is how do you build one of the world’s busiest websites that will scale affordably? You use open source software.

Twitter showed everyone their cards recently by publishing all the open source projects that they are contributing to. This is the picture of how open source software should work.

Organization has a a big, hard problem to solve. They write some software or update existing software and …

I have been a little bit stubborn on my concession that cloud computing is really going to be the wave of the future. Though lately I have been playing with a lot of cloud related technologies and am hooked. Spin up 10 (or 100) Linux servers in a minute from a web page with no real systems management skills and then you start seeing the power of cloud computing. As I try to get smarter on cloud computing I compiled the following list of resources that I have found helpful.  If you have a great cloud resource please feel free to let me know what I am missing on.

Cloud and Virtualization Guides and Whitepapers

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Last month cloud computing and systems management expert John Willis published his best of Cloud Computing for 2009 list he calls the Cloudies.  I am not an expert on the latest developments in cloud computing so it was nice to get a list of the best (in his expert opinion) cloud computing tools. I was especially interested in the latest open source software and I did a little research on each of these projects to see if they had active development mailing lists, regular releases  and a real community behind …

Today I caught a tweet from Kara Swisher referencing some exclusive news she posted on Boomtown about VMware’s upcoming deal to buy Zimbra from Yahoo! This is would be VMware’s second acquisition of an open source ISV in under a year. In August 2009 VMware …

Removing Barriers to the Community - MySQL Moves to Bazaar - Jay Pipes It is the role of a community manager to remove the barriers — both technical and ideological — between the user/developer community and the company or group of individuals which produces the open source software

Linux.com :: Lessons learned from NCSU FOSS class As textbooks, [...]

Over the last few years there has been a lot of fanfare around open source companies and their liquidation events. Most of the news has been around Sun’s billion dollar acquisition of MySQL or the Citrix acquisition of Xen and even Yahoo’s acquisition of Zimbra. In contrast there was little attention paid to the SourceFire. Actually if you ask most open source users about SourceFire they would probably answer “SourceWho?” If you ask open source users if they have heard of ClamAV or Snort they probably would be able to tell you that they are the leading open source software for virus protection and intrusion detection respectively. Recently, SourceFire has been in the news a …

It seems that open source maven, Matt Asay along with well-known Microsoft blogger Mary Jo Foley have come to the conclusion that Microsoft doesn’t need open source. Asay contends that Microsoft’s open source activity has more to do with regulators than best practices and user collaboration.

Microsoft’s open-source charade is not about customers. It’s about regulators. Until Microsoft can convince U.S. and European regulators that its market power is not as bad as it once was, the company will need to hide behind expressions of openness.

Hence, Microsoft “opens” up its protocols (i.e., lets everyone read but not touch…without forking over cash). It inks “open” interoperability agreements with Novell …

Last year open source analyst Michael Coté of Redmonk coined the term Little Four to describe four up-and-coming open source management vendors and as a foil to the Big Four of systems management.

In the open source space, the 4 names that come up each time ? usually from people I?m talking with even before I say anything ? are: Zenoss, Hyperic, GroundWorks, and openQRM.

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