On Sat, Oct 1, 2011 at 2:15 PM, Baz <[email protected]> wrote: > Now what about open-source - how many people do you know can reliably fix a > bug in Linux or MySQL or Apache, at a reasonable cost? It would often be > cheaper/easier/safer to just move to Windows, Oracle or IIS to solve the > problem.
Until you hit a bug in that proprietary tech and then you're completely at the mercy of the vendor with no ability to fix it yourself. > Not to mention writing the patch is only the beginning, it starts > getting real hairy managing that patch, testing for regression when the core > is updated, etc. It's a costly, complicated and delicate endeavor to > maintain your own branch of a complex open-source software. That's why you submit patches back to the project so it gets incorporated and you don't have to manage it going forward. That said, Adobe maintains it's own internal versions of several well-known open source projects (e.g., JBoss AS) and definitely finds it worth their while to maintain distinct forks, merging in updates as needed, mostly because they ship commercial products that bundle those projects. > Amazon, Rackspace and GoGrid aren't that portable either. Before you know it > you will start having complex scripts to build/setup your AMI's Look at jClouds and Pallet. Those support a variety of cloud providers via an abstraction that lets you specify what you want your systems to look like and those frameworks automatically "do the right thing" for the chosen cloud provider - so you can write your scripts once and switch cloud providers at will. There's also Chef, Puppet, Glu and several other deployment frameworks that are provider-neutral. There's been a huge amount of work done in infrastructure management over the last few years that smooths out the differences. There are also open source libraries that provide abstractions over the various providers data storage offerings so you can write against those instead of the vendor-specific APIs. -- Sean A Corfield -- (904) 302-SEAN An Architect's View -- http://corfield.org/ World Singles, LLC. -- http://worldsingles.com/ Railo Technologies, Inc. -- http://www.getrailo.com/ "Perfection is the enemy of the good." -- Gustave Flaubert, French realist novelist (1821-1880) -- official tag/function reference: http://openbd.org/manual/ mailing list - http://groups.google.com/group/openbd?hl=en
