Open source trends will play a pivotal role in modern computing, particularly in application development and IT infrastructure. With open source’s rapid rise in prominence, the trends remain relatively obscure to the world. Open source being the ground zero for technology development has become the preferred way of growing hot new technology, particularly for start-ups. The open source juggernaut is set to sail well in 2021 and is project growth in the years to come.

From enterprise solutions to cloud architects, from containers to encryption tools, and from data tools to insight creators, open source had managed to build the most avant-garde products including security firewalls in recent years. Its consistent pattern of growth has invited major IT giants to obtain stakes in innovative projects.

 Rise of Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open-source system to automate deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications to leverage on-premises, hybrid, or public cloud infrastructure. Kubernetes allows scaling without increasing the ops team. Before Kubernetes, the development and deployment of cloud-native applications were challenging. After Kubernetes, open source platforms do all the heavy lifting. The platform for running containerized workloads attracted developers from the open source community around the world, and its functions are quite similar to an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution and a Platform-as-a-Service resource (PaaS). It also offers the facility to monitor the status of a deployment in-progress, and complements a DevOps ecosystem.

Fog Computing

Fog computing is a distributed network connecting edge computing and cloud or IoT. The core idea of a distributed network is that it connects different environments. Fog computing frameworks provide more choices to process data when appropriate.

Cisco partnered with Microsoft, Dell, Intel and Princeton University in 2015 to form the OpenFog Consortium. General Electric (GE), Hitachi, Foxconn came forward to contribute to the mission. Promotion and standardization were the primary goals of the consortium. It had also merged with Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) in 2019.

Data Gets Bigger and Better

Big data will continue to get bigger and better. Open-source technologies will continue to make big data into the future. Let’s take a look at the powerful open source tools that handle big data.

Apache Hadoop

Apache Hadoop has enormous capabilities in processing large-scale data. It is also considered to be the most prominent tool used widely in the big-data industry. This is a 100 percent open source framework and runs on commodity hardware in an existing data center. Furthermore, it can run on a cloud infrastructure.

Hadoop has four parts, which are:

• Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) – a distributed file system compatible with very high scale bandwidth
• MapReduce:A programming model
• YARN:It is a platform that manages and schedules Hadoop’s resources
• Libraries:It helps other modules to work with Hadoop

MongoDB is an open source NoSQL database. It has a lot of built-in features and it is a cross-platform compatible application. It is suitable for the business that needs fast and real-time data. It also runs on MEAN software stack, NET applications and, Java platform.

Key features of MongoDB:

• It stores any type of data like integer, string, array, object, boolean, date, etc.
• It gives flexibility in cloud-based infrastructure
• It partitions data across the servers in a cloud structure
• MongoDB’s dynamic schemas is another way of cost-saving

HPCC

High-Performance Computing Cluster (HPCC) is one of the best open source big data tools and the competitor of Hadoop in the market.

Important features of HPCC:

• Helps in the parallel data processing
• Runs on commodity hardware
• Comes with binary packages supported for Linux distributions
• Supports end-to-end big data workflow management

Open Source and Cloud Factor

With most IT departments willing to avoid installing and maintaining applications locally when possible, the cloud is becoming the chosen platform for open source applications. And the trend is not just limited to small app developers; even Microsoft Office 365 is a semi-cloud offering including its chief rival Google Apps. Hybrid cloud gave enterprises choices – to figure out the right kind of cloud that can handle their workloads. However, its definition changed over time. Initially thought of in the context of cloud bursting where the on-premise infrastructure can reach out to a public cloud if usage spikes, the hybrid cloud now addresses data and application portability without racking up bandwidth bills for enterprises.

Hybrid cloud today is essentially a functional and effective combo of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, container platforms, and public clouds, which facilitates data and application portability from one location to another whenever necessary.

 Open Source Security

What makes open source solutions the big fat targets is their rising popularity and ubiquity, which also makes the industry to take notice and collaboratively fund (once woefully under-resourced) projects like OpenSSL.

OpenSSL is licensed under an Apache-style license. Barring some simple license conditions, OpenSSL is free for both commercial and non-commercial purposes. Users can report vulnerabilities and they get fixed regularly.

Data Encryption

This is the foremost and basic way to secure the whole data and encrypt your entire data to encode a message or information. Starting from small-scale enterprises to large corporates spend millions of dollars for a secure way of transmitting and receiving. As chances are high for cybercriminals to keep a tab on any careless distribution of data, mainly from financial institutions, and use it for fraudulent activities. So, user inputs and personally identifiable information (PII) have to be protected with utmost importance.

Even though, there are numerous encryption tools available in both closed and open source software libraries, VeraCrypt, AxCrypt, FileVault, GNU Privacy Guard are popular among free tools.

Office Applications

Microsoft Office has an elephant share of users amongst office applications. It had further developed that to Office 365 combining email, video conference, and its traditional applications (Excel, PowerPoint, etc.). It could also propagate Office 365 as a complete solution with document control features.

In the open source arena, the Documents Foundation community’s LibreOffice based on OpenOffice.org is one of the most popular software. The group of applications is observed as a feasible alternative to Microsoft Office 365 and acts as a free tool for edit, document and distribute content. The developer community claims, “we believe that users should have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change, and improve the software that we distribute.” It adds, “while we do offer no-cost downloads of the LibreOffice suite of programs, free software becomes the foremost a matter of liberty, not price.”

Apart from LibreOffice, WPS, Polaris and a few others also offer open source document solutions for mobile and computer users.

Conclusion

For open source enthusiasts, the last few years were full of exciting developments which contributed to the growth of many open source services – from open source CMS development to open source cloud. Infrastructure software is getting paradigm shifts and new developments under open source licenses massively expand their potential. Until now, there hasn’t been any disappointment for open source supporters but has exceptional resources and reasons to endorse the idea. Hopefully, we will see open source dominating even more soon.