It’s hard to keep track of all the technological advancements we have witnessed till now. The evolution of open source cloud and enterprise infrastructure software transformed the way many how companies provide open source development services. Back when OpenStack first showed up, it was first seen as a better, more efficient way to deploy and manage virtual machines, but turned out to be much more. It was a natural evolution with huge potential.

Last year, we witnessed such an evolution in open source cloud that changed the way the technology was used, with many incremental upgrades. Today, most applications we use on a daily basis have become cloud-native. In addition, hybrid and edge computing environments present even more potential.

So basically, open source cloud is bring major changes in a short span of time. Here are a few things that happened last year that you might have missed.

OpenStack growth

With enterprises increasingly starting to favor multi-cloud strategies, OpenStack had a phenomenal growth. According a survey sponsored by Cloudify, OpenStack was found to be the most widely deployed cloud infrastructure. Half of the organizations surveyed were found to manage more than one cloud, and prefer multi-cloud strategies that avoid vendor lock-in. A combination of AWS and OpenStack turned out to be quite popular in enterprises including non-IT ones.

Edge computing expands the scope of the open cloud

The advent of Edge computing birthed a new breed of enterprise cloud computing solutions, albeit raising the complexity notably. Evidently, it’s not the scale of the cloud that keeps growing exponentially, but also the scope. To effectively leverage Edge computing, a powerful cloud software stack that can be deployed efficiently and sustainably, is required. This is where open source makes a difference.

Kubernetes the game changer

Before Kubernetes, development and deployment of cloud-native applications were challenging. After Kubernetes, the open source platform does all the heavy lifting. The platform for running containerized workloads attracted developers from the open source community around the world, and functions quite similar to an Infrastructure-as-a-Service solution and a Platform-as-a-Service resource. It also offers the facility to monitor the status of a deployment in-progress, and complements a DevOps ecosystem.

Hybrid cloud

Hybrid cloud gave enterprises choices – to figure out the right kind of cloud that can handle their workloads. However, its definition changed over time. Initially thought of in the context of cloud bursting where the on-premise infrastructure can reach out to a public cloud if usage spikes, hybrid cloud now address data and application portability without racking up bandwidth bills for enterprises.

Hybrid cloud today is essentially a functional and effective combo of Software-as-a-Service applications, container platforms, and public clouds, which facilitates data and application portability from one location to another whenever necessary.

Conclusion

For open source enthusiasts, the last few years were full of exciting developments which contributed to the growth of many open source services – from open source CMS development to open source cloud. Infrastructure software are getting paradigm shifts and new developments under open source licenses massively expands their potential. As of now, 2018 hasn’t been disappointing for open source supporters. Hopefully, we will see open source dominating even more soon.