A business case for Linux at scale

The trick with what we call "scale" is an alignment of technology, use and business models. For example, the Linux kernel itself has no business model, any more than does geology or the periodic table. What we call 'kernel space' is low-level, foundational. In that role it supports the vast region we call 'user space'. This is where applications live. Here there may or may not be business models. Apache itself has no business model, although it supports a all kinds of business through its enormous "because effects". That is, far more money is made because of Apache than with it. Yet there is still plenty of money to be made with Linux, Apache and other foundational members of the LAMP stack, especially if you provide those foundations in reliable ways at costs lower than customers would pay to do it themselves.

Yet DIY has always been at the heart of Linux Love, going back to when Linus Torvalds DIY'd Linux in the first place. That's why the sweet spot for large providers of Linux servers is to make DIY easy for experts, and the customers of experts. The hosting business has been doing this since the dawn of the ISP. But lately Amazon has taken fresh advantage of its own scale as a huge company, by providing limitless low-cost storage and compute foundations through AWSes (Amazon Web Services) best known as S3 (Simple Storage Service) and EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud). With these Amazon offers storage and compute power as raw utilities akin to electric, gas and water service. Will S3, EC2 and its inevitable competitors support the same kind of growth in the virtual world that those more elemental utilities have long supported in the physical world? So far it looks like the answer is yes.

Let's take one DIY example from the far end of user space: creating audio and video productions. Here we have a start-up called Animoto, which mashes the skills of experienced TV and film producers with users' videos, music and images. At the back end Animoto uses both S3 and EC2. Connecting Animoto's front and Amazon's back ends is a new company called RightScale. Thorsten von Eicken, CEO and founder of RightScale, says his company "provides the management platform, expertise, and key critical components (load-balanced web front end, MySQL master/slave, grid manager) to help companies focus on their core competencies that differentiate their businesses rather than the 'muck' of infrastructure".

So how exactly does RightScale do the mucking for the likes of Animoto? Thorsten von Eicken again:

We provide server deployment and management platform that provides open deployment recipes that users can inspect and customize. We call this "open deployment." For example, we just made a "Rails all-in-one" server template available that contains a dozen recipes for installing an entire Rails app stack on an EC2 instance, from front-end load balancing across the Rails app processes to MySQL and periodic backups to Amazon S3. Each of these recipes is a shell script that installs some RPMs and customizes the installation for Rails. As a whole the server template allows users to simply plug-in the SVN repository holding their Rails app and launch the server, all in less than10 minutes.

But the point here is that users get not only the complete server template but also all the recipes in open source form. They can see how we install, say, Apache and set-up the vhosts for ports 80 & 443 for their Rails app. If something breaks or they simply want to set things up differently (perhaps they don't want to automatically redirect from HTTP to HTTPS on the home page) they can clone our Apache config script, modify it, and insert theirs into the server template. Now they have the same power but customized.

Making this possible, in addition to the likes of Amazon, is a critical mass of open source tools and building materials. But even if the parts are free, the labor isn't. Which is what creates opportunities for companies like RightScale. "Cloud computing on commodity hardware requires some rethinking: load balancing in software on 'front-end nodes', rsync-like backups to Amazon S3, dealing with dynamic DNS for round-robin DNS entries, coordinating servers in novel ways, and many more that can be solved by putting together pieces from the vast open source toolkit and making minor changes where necessary", von Eicken says, adding, "Of course RightScale being a Rails site is built 100% on open source components, but which start-up these days isn't"?

Which moots the question of how you can make money with Linux and open source.

- Doc Searls