When your job is to provide the cloud infrastructure to run analytics and workloads across three that are more than 100 miles apart datacenters, sucking 100-plus petabytes from each daily, it’s no longer an even remotely credible option to buy it from Megavendor X. These days, the only place to find such software is on an open source repository somewhere.
Which is exactly what Didi Chuxing, the Uber of China, did.
“No proprietary software can solve all the problems of companies that operate at the scale of Didi,” said Li Luo, technical director of big data at Didi. “We need access to the source code so we can update it and contribute back frequently to meet changing requirements. For companies like ours, open source software is the right choice.”
In reality, it’s the only choice.
Five years ago, Cloudera cofounder Mike Olson wrote, “No dominant platform-level software infrastructure has emerged in the last ten years in closed-source, proprietary form.” In significant measure, this stems from the realities of operating at web-scale: The financial costs, never mind the technical costs, of trying to scale proprietary hardware and software systems are simply too high. Companies like Google and Facebook keep gifting genius creations to the open source community, driving innovation faster, well beyond the realm of proprietary firms’ ability to compete in data infrastructure.
