Amazon and Google had to forge their own tools to handle the deluge of web traffic they face. They've kept those tools in-house, but others -- including Facebook, NASA and Yahoo -- have built clones of some of Amazon and Google's most famous inventions. Now companies have a wide range of open source projects they can use to build clouds in their own data centers.
The latest to turn to open source is Baidu, the fifth most popular website in the world. A recent presentation describes how the Chinese company is using an open source "platform cloud" called Cloud Foundry to power part of its web empire.
Cloud Foundry was developed by VMware but is now handled by the spin-off company Pivotal. Like other platform clouds, it can run on top of public clouds like Amazon EC2 or private clouds like OpenStack or VMware vCloud. The idea is to provide developers with a layer of abstraction that absolves them of many server management chores, freeing them up to focus on writing code.
Baidu is China's largest web company and the country's most popular search engine. Like Google, it also provides additional services, like maps and news. The company has 700 developers building applications on Cloud Foundry, working on apps that serve over 1 billion page views a day, according to the Baidu presentation. Baidu couldn't immediately be reached for comment.
It's the latest big win for Cloud Foundry, which has been garnering more support from large companies lately. IBM announced Wednesday that it will offer Cloud Foundry through its own private and public cloud services. It will also certify its Java middleware product WebSphere to run on Cloud Foundry, and become a regular contributor to the project.
"We've been taking our time and learning how best to contribute to the project," says Angel Diaz, VP of IBM Cloud Labs. "We know you can't just walk in and say 'Here's some code, now start using it.'" To show its support for the community, IBM will co-host a Cloud Foundry developer conference with Pivotal, and sit on an advisory board for the project.
Earlier this summer CenturyLink -- the 3rd largest telco in the U.S. -- acquired Cloud Foundry hosting company AppFog. And the largest telco in the world -- Japan's NTT -- has long used Cloud Foundry for as part of its cloud hosting service, and became a core contributor to the project earlier this year.
PayPal meanwhile recently revealed that it's using a competing open source platform: RedHat's OpenShift. But even that's a win for Cloud Foundry -- just as Baidu's use of Cloud Foundry is a win for RedHat. These real-world users provide evidence that there's real value in platform clouds.
