News

IBM Launches Learning Site: Open Source Cloud Guide

• By David Ramel
• 10/26/2021

IBM launched the Open Source Cloud Guide site to provide a learning resource for hybrid cloud and multicloud developers, along with an agnostic view of how various clouds are using open source tech in various ways.

IBM famously revamped its entire corporate structure and business model to focus on hybrid clouds and artificial intelligence (AI) last year.

The company announced the Open Source Cloud Guide during the recent open source-focused All Things Open conference, saying it highlights various use cases that are important in hybrid cloud environments, along with important open source projects in those areas. It was open sourced so developers can both use and contribute to the learning resources and use cases.

"Our goal is to give the global developer ecosystem one place to go to see where to focus their open-source development efforts when developing for specific use cases related to multicloud development," IBM said.

The guide is broken down into sections for AI, APIs, Big Data, Containers and Databases. For each use case, the guide provides:

• Overview of the concept or use case
• Explanation of a traditional solution to achieve it
• Key open source projects
• Highlight of how major cloud providers are using open source to address the use case

Specifically, each section contains:

• a "what is ..." header, with the AI section looking like this:

  

• a "why is this important ..." header
• a solution sketch (for Big Data, this has "Batch data processing with Spark" and "Real-time data processing with Kafka")
• a list of limitations
• a list of key open source projects (for Big Data, this includes Spark, Kafka and Flink)
• a cloud comparison that shows how a component -- Managed Spark for example -- is offered up by IBM Cloud, GCP, AWS, Azure and Operator, like this:

  

• a list of additional resources including blogs, videos and tutorials

For things the guide won't do, the project's GitHub site lists:

• Deep-dive on any one technology
• Exclude any cloud providers
• Be an exhaustive list of all open source projects in the space

"Over the past two decades, the rise of cloud technologies and the proliferation of open source software have developed in tandem, with open source software now underpinning all major clouds," the site says. "A 2020 O'Reilly Survey highlights how hiring managers are looking for developers who have open source development, even more than skills related to a single proprietary cloud. The 2021 Open Source Jobs Report from the Linux Foundation echoed this desire for developers who are skilled in open source software development.

"With that backdrop, we decided to create a guide that highlights how cloud providers are using open source in their offerings and to offer guidance on where you can go to gain skills."