The strife I’ll get for this will be fantastic but it needs to be said….open source software is amazing and vendor commercial software is outstanding, it just depends on the view.
Planning and rolling out facilities we engage with a number of vendors and a number of their deployment teams who are flummoxed by our suggestion of Open Source, and Open Source gurus who are horrified that we would PAY for certain things. You just can’t make everyone happy at the same time.
You really do need to get the mixture right and you bet your ass it needs to have context to your business but more importantly where you need to be in 5 years time. I would posit that anyone that in our industry needs to take a look at their engineering teams, their IT teams and their ops teams, and arm them with the tools they need not the tools they are dictated to….a few questions to ask yourself before cutting that purchase order or credit card number….some specific some broad:
- Windows Hyper V vs VMWARE – Windows Hyper V allows you to spin up a boatload of virtual machines and you don’t need to pay per VM….just your OS cost (even less if you use Centos for your VM’s which is freeeeeee)
- File Systems – there is a bunch of file systems out there that are proprietary and cost a bomb, some that are reasonably priced and some that are open source….and performance is NOT the differentiator as you would expect. CEPH is a fascinating project https://ceph.io/ceph-storage/file-system/ as is Open ZFS https://github.com/openzfs/zfs . One that definitely is of interest is MinIO which is free and paid depending on your support https://min.io/ – Whack your these on your storage and robert is your father’s brother
- PFsense – I was schooled by someone a while ago about firewalls….and now I can’t even look at Palo Alto Networks etc in the same light. PFsense costs you NOTHING https://www.pfsense.org/ and meets the very stringent security requirements of our industry…you have a sub 10k firewall that is community supported with a boatload of options that meet the criticality of security. Dell 1 RU server with these components easy. One of our clients CEO’s i’m pretty sure was close to tears when we said ‘please don’t spend 200k on a firewall, here’s the alternate’
- Open VPN – adding the open-source VPN https://openvpn.net/ stack for your remote editors with RDP. Badass. Free. None of this 20-30-60k bollocks from the vendors….same frameworks, same industry recognition, less of the pricetag.
Any of these topics are contextual – if you have no in house support or need mission-critical services uptime etc, vendors provide this crucial component. You can have Linux for free always…unless you want a bunch of support in which case you have loads of paid options.
But I would ask you if you don’t have in house technical services, a junior who is interested in building cool things, or a great technology leader with a modest RnD budget…save yourself hundreds of thousands in the long run whilst putting technology in the prime position to drive the business forward.
Written by a recovering vendor sales guy 😀