Managing the impact of open source software on data centers

Open source software (OSS) offers many benefits for organizations large and small—not the least of which is the price tag, which is often zero. Zip. Nada. Free-as-in-beer. Beyond that compelling price tag, what you often get with OSS is a lack of a hidden agenda. You can see the project, you can see the source code, you can see the communications, you can see what’s going on in the support forums.

When OSS goes great, everyone is happy, from techies to accounting teams. Yes, the legal department may want to scrutinize the open source license to make sure your business is compliant, but in most well-performing scenarios, the lawyers are the only ones frowning. (But then again, the lawyers frown when scrutinizing commercial closed-source software license agreements too, so you can’t win.)

The challenge with OSS is that it can be hard to manage, especially when something goes wrong. Depending on the open source package, there can be a lot of mysteries, which can make ongoing support, including troubleshooting and performance tuning, a real challenge. That’s because OSS is complex.

It’s not like you can say, well, here’s my Linux distribution on my server. Oh, and here’s my open source application server, and my open source NoSQL database, and my open source log suite. In reality, those bits of OSS may be from separate OSS projects, which may (or may not) have been tested for how well they work together.

A separate challenge is that because OSS is often free-as-in-beer, the software may not be in the corporate inventory. That’s especially common if the OSS is in the form of a library or an API that might be built into other applications you’ve written yourself. The OSS might be invisible but with the potential to break or cause problems down the road.

You can’t manage what you don’t know about

When it comes to OSS, there may be a lot you don’t know about, such as those license terms or interoperability gotchas. Worse, there can be maintenance issues — and security issues. Ask yourself: Does your organization know all the OSS it has installed on servers on-prem or in the cloud? Coded into custom applications? Are you sure that all patches and fixes have been installed (and installed correctly), even on virtual machine templates, and that there are no security vulnerabilities?

In my essay “The six big gotchas: The impact of open source on data centers,” we’ll dig into the key topics: License management, security, patch management, maximizing uptime, maximizing performance, and supporting the OSS.