Linux shows its mettle when it comes to new cloud and edge applications – Data Economy

In 1991, something called the Linux kernel made its first appearance among what was then a largely hobbyist software community, but it has since been the driving force for anything useful in managing the internet, the cloud and now the edge.

Were only two yearsoff the 30th anniversary of the Linux kernel, which gavethe open source software movement a turbo boost. At the annual OpenSource Summit Europe run by the Linux Foundation this week in Lyon,France, Data Economy attended to find out how open source willaddress the evolving needs of cloud, edge and IoT connectivity.

The first time thiswriter saw Linux creator Linus Torvalds give a presentation aboutopen source it was at an Informix database conference in Seattle in1998, and the big news from that event was that Informix hadintroduced an open source version of its database. Not that longafter the event IBM acquired Informix to confirm its own interest insupporting the open source development community, as well as makingmoney out of it.

And 20 years afterSeattle, IBM splashed out $34bn in 2018 on acquiring one of thebiggest names in open source Red Hat. And that same year,Microsoft, once a fierce opponent of open source, as it saw it as athreat to its proprietary software, spent $7.5bn on acquiring themain open source software development platform GitHub anotherLinus Torvalds creation.

Thats an awful lot ofmoney spent in two transactions, further confirming that open sourceis the environment that will support future productivity andconnectivity applications, whether in the cloud or at the edge which was demonstrated at the Open Source Summit.

Speakers at theconference repeatedly stated that open source is present at somelevel in 99% of new software being produced, with containers, cloudmanagement software Kubernetes and the Linux kernel continuing tobuild on top of the Apache servers that were already responsible forpowering most of the internet over 20 years ago.

Linus Torvalds (pictured left below) was interviewed on stage in front of many hundreds of conference delegates and was given the opportunity to again address the ever present niggling doubt in some quarters around the security of open source, particularly in relation to its use in embedded devices in safety critical environments.

The many tens ofthousands of Linux developers around the world arent concerned aboutthe safety of Linux of course, and thats not just because the Linuxkernel helps some of them put a little food on their table. AsTorvalds pointed out, when it comes to bugs that are regularlydiscovered in the constantly changing kernel, its not the kernelthat is simply deployed in the commercial and safety critical arena.

He said: Operatingsystems are complicated things. People are still cleaning up codethat has been around for years. The kind of bugs we see on desktopsare not the kind of thing we see in safety critical systems that arerepeatedly tried and tested. The kernel that we continually work onis not what is distributed by others for applications for automobilesand industrial environments. There are years of testing on thesoftware before it ends up in safety critical or real-time systems.

For his part, despitethe conference showing off various useful open source projectsdesigned to support and power new markets in the cloud and at theedge, Torvalds said he wasnt a programmer anymore and that henow wrote more email than code these days, advising Linuxdevelopers on how to get software updates across the line and managenew projects.

One of those projectsnow making its name at the edge is Zephyr, which is a small footprintpiece of software that can be used to manage devices ranging from IoTgateways and data storage solutions to gadgets including headsets,building security systems and even hearing aids located at the edge.

The Linux Foundationjust keeps churning such solutions out, and this one allowsorganisations to use open source where the Linux kernel is just toobig to be used in sensors and small circuits. Kate Stewart of theLinux Foundation helps to run the project and paints a rosy pictureon its takeup and future cloud industry backing.

She says: The likesof Google and Amazon Web Services are showing big interest in Zephyr,along with project members that include chip makers Intel and NXP.

A number of IoTproviders are building ecosystems to enable comprehensive solutionsthat address all segments of the market. This includes theinvolvement of Google, Microsoft and Amazon that have tailored IoTsolutions of their own. Each of these three can help partners andcustomers to securely provision, authenticate, configure, control,monitor and maintain all of their IoT devices.

Zephyr will make iteasier to process data at the edge where it is created, instead ofhaving to send it into the public cloud first, reducing latency andspeeding analytics performance.

Companies including Armare also expected to get seriously involved, as Zephyr will integratenicely with its Pelion Device Management offering, which aims toprovide simple, secure and flexible IoT management capabilities for arange of devices.

The Pelion IoT Platformconsists of three major components covering device management forprovisioning, identity and access management and updates;connectivity management to support wireless connectivity standardsfor any device; and data management for the analysis of trusted datafrom individual devices and enterprise-wide big data deployments.

Jim Zemlin, executivedirector of the Linux Foundation, enthused to conference delegates:Open source is now the building block for almost all products andservices. And we now want to extend the ecosystem to push standards.

Cloud service providers, telcos and other data connectivity providers should perhaps be grateful they can tap into the work of thousands of open source developers, who usefully dont even have to be on their payroll.

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Linux shows its mettle when it comes to new cloud and edge applications - Data Economy