With all the momentum around moving enterprise software to the cloud, I was curious about the level of support from the open source world, not just relating to the obvious open source cloud initiatives, but also around the commercial cloud providers. So I searched the Black Duck KnowledgeBase and found ~2200 projects that were cloud related and started doing some analysis to see which cloud platforms seem to be getting the most attention from the open source community.
Not surprisingly, there were four platforms with traction from the open source community, including Amazon, Azure, Rackspace, and force.com.
As expected, Amazon has the largest ecosystem of open source projects around it with 46% of the platform-specific projects. This was expected as the early market leader. Surprisingly though, was that Azure has a large and growing open source project ecosystem, with 36% of the platform specific projects.
Then in an effort to validate the broader numbers, I took a look at the breakdown of open source projects that are specifically focused on cloud infrastructure management and found results that matched the overall project distribution.
While looking, I also noticed that a large number of Azure projects seemed to be hosted on Github, so I ran a breakdown and found that surprisingly more than half (56%) of the Azure projects were hosted on Github as opposed to 43% hosted on Codeplex.
My next cuts will be around technologies and industries, looking for what the most popular programming languages and tools are used on the various cloud platforms, in addition to seeing if there are certain industries that favor one platform versus another. If there are other cuts that you’d like to see, please comment and let me know.
