Al Gillen is responsible for open source research and oversees developer and DevOps research at IDC. Al gave a keynote at the Open Source Leadership Summit at which he provided some historical context for what's happening today in open source and presented recent research on digital transformation, commercial open source support requirements, and how organizations are thinking about cloud-native architecture adoption and deployment.
Listen to the podcast for the whole conversation but a few specific points that Al made were:
Digital transformation can be thought of as taking physically connected systems and logically connecting them, i.e. connecting the processes, the data, and the decision-making.
It's important to bridge new cloud-native systems to existing functionality. Organizations are not going to be rewriting old applications for the most part and those "legacy" systems still have a great deal of value.
Enterprises are asking for open source DevOps tools, but most are specifically asking for commercially-supported open source tools.
Audio:
Link to MP3 (00:15:46)
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Transcript:
Gordon
Haff: Hi, everyone. Welcome to another edition of the "Cloudy
Chat" podcast. I'm here at the Open Source Leadership Summit with Al
Gillen of IDC, who gave one of the keynotes this morning. Welcome, Al. How
about giving a little background about yourself?
Al
Gillen: Hey, Gordon, thanks a lot. Thanks, everybody for listening.
This is Al Gillen. I'm a group vice president at IDC. I'm responsible for our
open source research, and oversee our developer and DevOps research.
Gordon:
One of the things you went through in your keynote this morning was the
historical perspective of how Linux is developed. Both of us have pretty much
been following Linux from the beginning, certainly from its beginnings as
something that was interesting commercially. Maybe you could recap that in a
couple of minutes or so.
Al:
I actually went back to a presentation I delivered to the Linux Foundation,
an event at the Collaboration Summit that was back in 2008. I pulled those
slides up, because I was curious. "What can I learn from what we talked
about back then, and how does that relate to what's going on in the industry
today?"
I
went back, and I pulled up the deck. I was looking at some of the things that I
thought were really interesting. For example, I was looking at one of the first
pieces of data, which compared perceptions of Linux from 1999 and 2001.
Remember
what the time frame was there. Linux had only just begun to be commercially
accepted in the '99‑2000/2001 time frame. One of the things that served as a
significant accelerator for Linux at that time frame was the dot‑com bust.
What
happened then is we had a big contraction in the stock market. Most large
companies, what they did is they went and they started to cut costs. We all
know that one of the places they first cut costs is IT.
Suddenly,
the IT departments were charged with standing up new Web servers and new
network‑infrastructure servers and so forth, and they had no budget to do it.
What did they do?
They
went and they got a free copy of Linux. They recycled a well‑equipped PC or x86
server that had been taken out of service, and they turned it into a Linux
server.
When
we look back at the data that we saw then, really, one of the big drivers for
Linux was initial price. People said, "Yeah, it was great. The cost was
really low." One of the things that was also amazing was the users back
then rated the reliability of Linux as very, very high.
In
fact, when you compare it to other operating systems, it compared very
favorably to much more mature operating systems. That context was really
fascinating, but when you think about it, that was just the beginning of a long
gestation period for Linux.
Over
the next, what, seven, eight, nine years, as Linux became a truly mature and a
truly robust commercial operating system that had both the features, had the
application portfolio, and had the customer base to use it, it took, basically
a decade to get there.
Gordon:
You've been doing some more research recently. What are your numbers
showing today?
Al:
A couple of things that I showed in the presentation today. One is we
presented data on Linux operating system shipments. One of the things that's
happened over the last few years is that Linux has continued to accelerate, in
part because of the build‑out of cloud.
Most
of the public cloud infrastructure, with the exception of the Microsoft Azure
cloud, is almost all Linux. To the extent that Google continues to build out
and Amazon continues to build out, and companies like that ‑‑ Facebook,
Twitter, and so forth, it's primarily Linux being stood up.
That
has driven the growth of non‑commercial Linux, meaning distributions that are
not supported by a commercial company you might think of, rather are either
they're CentOS, or they're Debian, or potentially Ubuntu, that's not supported,
things like that, as well as Amazon Linux, and Google's own Linux and so forth.
That's
been really where a lot of the growth is, but that's not to say that there
hasn't been growth in the commercial side of the market. There's been growth
there as well.
Gordon:
What are some of the drivers that you hear? I know you did some research
for us. You also have some research here around commercially‑supported environments
and maybe some of the reasons why people buy those.
Al:
That has been something which has been really consistent through the
years. We find that large enterprise organizations have a tendency to prefer
commercially‑supported software.
That
has always been the case with Linux and yes, we find that there is [also] non‑commercial
Linux. You'll talk to any enterprise ‑‑ and you could talk to a really big Red
Hat shop or a big SUSE shop, and you ask them, "What is in your
infrastructure?" They'll typically tell you that, "Yeah, we're 95
percent or 98 percent Red Hat, but we've also got some CentOS," or,
"We've got some Debian," or, "We've got SUSE for this one
application."
They
generally have a mix of other things in there. The same thing, if you talk to a
SUSE shop, where they'll say, "Yeah, we're mostly SUSE, but we've got some
openSUSE," or again, "We've got some Ubuntu or CentOS, or something
else in the mix."
The
reason why is that these things get stood up for work loads that are considered
not critical. Maybe they might be something simple like a DNS server, maybe
something that's a print file server, or maybe a Web server which is providing
some internal Web serving capabilities, something that's not critical if it
disappears off the network suddenly. There's not going to be customers that are
left hanging.
Gordon:
Let's switch gears and talk about digital transformation. This is one of
those terms that I think is almost a cliche at this point, at least when you go
to these types of events, because we hear it at every one of these events.
As
somebody I was talking to recently said, just because it's cliche doesn't mean
it's not an important trend. What are some of the things that IDC is seeing
about digital transformation?
Al:
If we go out to, say 2025, and we look back, I believe that we're going
to look back and say, "Yeah, the mid‑teen years were important years from
a digital transformation perspective."
When
we at IDC talk about digital transformation, what we're really talking about is
we're talking about the interconnection of all of the systems that are in our
environments.
When
I say interconnection, we're not talking about getting them all on the same
network. We've done that. It's been done for 20 years, already. What we're
talking about is interconnecting the processes, interconnecting the data,
interconnecting the decision‑making. In many cases, that's not done.
We've
got systems that are physically connected, but are not connected from a logical
sense. That's what's happening with digital transformation. I might add that
the way we expect that that's going to happen is it's going to be a model where
we're going to be building new applications that are going to essentially
bridge the existing functionality that's on these servers.
We're
not going to be rewriting those old applications in a cloud‑native format, for
example. We're going to keep those applications. We may wrap them with some
consistent API so we can get access to the logic and the data.
But
at the end of the day, the business value that's in those applications that are
in place today remains valuable, and frankly, it's going to mean that the
applications themselves and the servers that they run on are workloads that are
going to be around for the long term.
Gordon:
I think that's a really important point, because one of the things that I
hear a lot when I talk to customers is the importance of this bridging of the
older systems that may be modernizing, but as you say, you're not turning them
into cloud‑native systems.
On
the other hand, you have these cloud‑native infrastructures. I think probably
in the industry, there's too much thinking of those as two disconnected
islands, and not enough thinking of the bridges, the integrations, and so
forth, between them.
Al:
There's a really good parallel here, and I like to bring this story up,
especially when I'm in a room full of end users. I like to say, "You guys
remember what you were doing in 1999?" You get a little bit of a quizzical
look, and I say, "Were you remediating any applications that had ywo digit
date codes?"
People
start nodding their heads. The next question I say is, "What did you do?
Did you fix them?" and the heads keep nodding. I say, "OK, can I see
a show of hands? How many of you have gotten rid of those systems, or do you
still have them in use?"
All
those same people, they put their hands up, reluctantly, I might add, and say,
"Yeah, we still have those systems in use." The point being is that
the value of the systems does not go away. The value of the systems is in the
data. It's in the processes and the business logic that are coded in those
applications.
Going
forward, we think the same thing's going to be true for the distributed
computing environment. All of the Linux servers that you have in place, all of
the Windows servers you have in place, have real important business value. The
logic and the data there is really valuable to your business, which means that
you're going to want to use that going forward.
I
do agree with you, when we build that cloud‑native applications, they're going
to help bridge these systems, but don't for a minute assume that those old
systems have no value left.
Gordon:
As we talk about the new applications that are going to be required for
this digital transformation, what are some of the...I think you even used the
term, they were the "pivot point," this morning. Tell us a little bit
more about that.
Al:
Again, taking a long view, so if we look out, say, if you go out to 2025,
and you look back, I think that we'll be able to draw a line in history and
say, "Somewhere between 2015 and 2017 or 2018, there's going to be this
line where everything before that line will be considered a legacy application,
and everything after that line is probably going to be a cloud‑native and a
modern application."
Again,
let's not associate the term legacy application with something that has no
value. Let's assume that that's an architectural statement more than anything
else.
When
I think about it, I believe we're right in the midst of this transition where
we begin to build all of our applications using a cloud‑native format, which
means that our applications are built to run on‑prem in private cloud, or off‑prem
in public cloud, which means that we have flexibility on where they run, how we
want to run them, how we want to scale them.
The
other thing I might add is remember that cloud‑native and cloud‑scale are not
necessarily the same thing. There's lots and lots of applications that should
be cloud‑native, but not all applications have to have cloud scale.
Take
for example your average enterprise. You've got ‑‑ pick your number ‑‑ it's 1
thousand, 10 thousand, 100 thousand users, whatever the number is, that access
your business applications. That number does not scale up to 1 million or 10
million overnight.
By
comparison, somebody who's doing, say, business to consumer, where there could
potentially be a consumer event that causes everybody to come in and access
that application. There you'd need to have the ability to do cloud‑level
scaling.
Gordon:
Al, going back to the commercial support still being important, you
certainly see in the cloud an awful lot of this consumption of free software,
but you mentioned earlier that enterprises by and large do want commercialized
tools. We're not talking just operating systems here.
Al:
No, in fact, operating systems are probably one of the best understood
pieces of open‑source software today. As we go up the stack, customers still
see value associated with commercialization, so a company that will take your
project and make it something that is consumable will provide the support.
The
reason why that's so valuable is that then the company does not have to have
the expertise on staff. You don't have to have a kernel guy, you don't have to
have a guy that knows how to patch Xen, for example, or a KVM if there's a
problem.
It's
really important to have that taken care of by somebody if you're a commercial
organization, which is in the business of selling widgets or manufacturing
things, or providing health care. That's your primary business. Your primary
business is not being in the business of IT.
We
ran a survey earlier this year. I guess it was actually late in 2016. We were
talking to people about their consumption of DevOps products. We asked a
question which I think was really interesting.
The
question was if they have a chance to buy a product, are they going to look at
a product which is open‑source, or are they going to look at a product which is
likely to be a closed‑source and/or a proprietary‑type product?
What
we found is we asked people to rank their preference on these things. The
answer came back as 45 percent of the people we talked to ranked their
preference for an open‑source base product as their first choice over anything
else.
If
you asked them what their preferences were, for example, for a proprietary
product, only 15 percent of the people said that was their first choice.
The
reason why this is really interesting is that when we look at that, these companies
are telling us that they want an open‑source base product, but they also told
us that they wanted it to be commercially supported.
They
could get the bits and run it as a project themselves. We asked that question
as well. That's not what they're asking for. They're asking for it to be
commercially supported. The reason why is if it breaks, you pick up the phone
or you get on your computer and send an email, and you say, "Fix it."
Gordon:
That was true going back with Linux in the early days as well. I think
one of the things that's happening today when you look at DevOps tools is there
is an incredible amount of innovation and number of products out there. That's
good news.
The
bad news is there's an incredible amount of innovation, rapidly changing
products, and a need to integrate all of those together.
Al:
You know what, Gordon? It's one of the challenges that we've had with
fast‑moving markets like this. When I say markets, I'm referring to open‑source,
collectively.
The
problem we have is that the technology changes so fast that the people, the end‑user
organizations, are not able to gain the skills fast enough to keep up with
these technology changes.
Frankly,
when we asked questions about Linux in the early 2000s, people said one of
their top challenges was having the skill set to support Linux. Today, we find
the same questions about things like container technology and using DevOps
tools.
Gordon:
To net it all out and close this out, what are some of the
recommendations, the guidance, that you give on probably pretty much a daily
basis to your clients?
Al:
There's a few things. Number one, recognize that cloud‑native
applications are going to be architected very differently than classic
applications. That's pretty much a given, but when you think about it, it
affects your choice of tools, it affects your choice of deployment scenarios,
and it affects your skills that you need to have on staff.
Another
thing is recognize that we've moved to an era of platform independence far
beyond anything we ever had before. We always like to talk about platform
independence, but we've never really had it.
Now,
with container technology and the ability to produce a true cloud‑native
application that's running on some kind of a framework which happens to be available
on‑prem or in cloud, you suddenly have the ability to move that application on‑prem
or off‑prem, or both ‑‑ run in both places at the same time if so you choose ‑‑
and be able to do that in a way that's been unprecedented in our industry.
Finally,
just to reiterate the other point is recognize that the existing applications
don't lose their value. They still have value. Yes, they may get bundled up in
a VM, or maybe packaged up in container and dropped into somebody's IS cloud,
but they're going to be around for the long term, and recognize that that's
something you have to support.
Again,
driving home that point I made earlier, recognize that all the new applications
we build today are going to have to bridge the classic applications we've had,
and the data that those applications support together with the modern things
that we're going to be doing with our new applications.
