The cloud was supposed to kill open source. Instead, savvy cloud operators appear to be using open source as an on-ramp to proprietary services, giving them reason to increase investments in complementary open source projects. Google is the obvious example, spinning out TensorFlow and Kubernetes as a way to raise a generation of developers anxious to perfect machine learning and container-driven workloads on the Google Cloud Platform.
But Google isn’t alone. It turns out that Amazon Web Services has its own open source strategy, one perhaps less obvious but no less potent. From my conversations with AWS customer InfoScout, AWS seems to be building natural bridges between on-premises databases like MySQL and cloud services like Amazon Aurora, giving customers a reason to start with open source but finish with AWS.
Moving from MySQL on prem to Aurora in the cloud
Just a few years back, one prominent criticism of public cloud IaaS platforms like AWS was that while enterprises might be happy to run dev-and-test workloads in the cloud, production would always happen within private datacenters.
That might have been true for a nanosecond, but it’s demonstrably, outrageously false today—companies like Capital One are dumping most of their datacenters to push the majority of workloads to the cloud. Concerns over governance and risk have given way to public clouds like AWS based on their security model, ability to provision infrastructure on the fly, elasticity to handle purchasing demands at peak times, high availability, and the pace of innovation.
