• Open-source operating systems’ role in cloud computing.
• The role open-source plays in the modern internet.
• First in a series focusing on open-source technology.

Cloud computing is one of those terms on which, outside the confines of the technology world, few people have a firm grasp of its meaning.

In the simplest terms possible, a computer ‘in the cloud’ is simply one that (usually) isn’t owned by an individual or company – somebody else’s computer, in other words. But it’s what runs on that remote machine that makes ‘the cloud’ so powerful. And the majority of cloud computers have Linux – one of the more popular open-source operating systems – as their foundation, on which runs open-source software.

This first article in a short series explores the central role open-source plays in everyday cloud services and how the modern internet would not exist without code written by communities of often-unpaid software developers over the last 50 years.

Open-source operating systems in the cloud

In many people’s lives, cloud computing plays a silent role, with users often unaware that they are leveraging cloud computing and using open-source software. The most obvious instance of cloud services is apparent in products like Box, Dropbox and Google Drive. In these cases, the environment presented to users, complete with icons of folders and documents, requires a much smaller leap of imagination to envisage the concept that the environment they interact with is at least computer-like and that the computer (and associated back-end services) is somewhere remote, ‘out there,’ on the internet.

In addition to ready-made services like the aforementioned Dropbox and Google Drive, many organisations make use of services based in the cloud, like workflow management platforms, HR software, book-keeping and finance packages and many hundreds of others. These pay-per-month or pay-per-seat platforms termed Saas (software as a service) are often hosted by large cloud providers, notably Amazon’s AWS, Google’s GCP, Microsoft’s Azure and those of smaller yet still behemothic Oracle, IBM, Cloudflare and so on.

The mention of Microsoft Azure usually brings to mind the Windows operating system, which, in many cases, is the platform with which most people are familiar. But despite the company name over the gate, more than 60% of Azure Marketplace applications (apps and services that can be created on the Azure cloud) are Linux based. On other cloud providers’ platforms, a much higher percentage of the technology of the offered services run on open-source operating systems (primarily Linux, but also BSD [Berkeley Systems Distribution]) rather than on the proprietary Windows Server platform.

Individual companies, too, can easily rent or lease computing facilities (usually comprising some combination of compute, networking, and storage) to run or develop their own solutions. The cloud providers’ infrastructure is designed to seamlessly provide more computing power, storage, or faster connectivity as and when required. Rather than host mission-critical applications or services on local hardware that comes with physical limitations in all those areas, the rush to cloud computing was in part driven by the elasticity and scalability of cloud computing available on demand.

Steps and hops

But despite the prevalence behind the scenes of software stacks that are freely available (under various licence terms), what’s even less known is that open-source software is perhaps most common in embedded systems. These are the ‘closed box’ appliances that navigate digital traffic across the internet, from a user’s phone or company mainframe to the rest of the internet. The routers, switches, aggregators, packet-shapers, caches and a dozen more variants, almost without exception, run software that is either open-source or based on open-source offerings that have been adapted to particular devices.

A prime example with which every ready will be acquainted is the humble home or small office wi-fi access point/router. Instead of taking on the immense challenge of crafting low-level software to handle the device’s hardware and numerous additional software levels to manage connections from many hundreds of users, plus transmit and receive data to and from the internet, companies leverage open-source software instead.

And with an open-source operating system, developers are free to pick and choose the elements of the Linux kernel that the device needs to run. Once the operating system is running, the software that runs on top – creating the administrator’s web configuration panel, the encryption, the data packet parsing needed to communicate – is, as you might expect, taken from open-source repositories.

Under the gleaming plastic of the (often ISP-provided) home wi-fi access point and internet router, for example, there will be a copy of OPNsense or OpenWrt, an Apache or NGINX web server, a SQL Lite or MySQL database, and a hundred more ephemeral, digital code components. All of these, and many thousands of their alternatives, are available, typically to download, change, redistribute and use.

Thus, the internet as we know it, its infrastructure and systems that host every system we rely on, from the smart washing machine’s tiny brain to the supercomputer calculating meteorological data at trillions of calculations per second, every time data touches hardware, it’s open-source software that’s handling the precious cargo.

The desktop and phone anomalies

Because most people’s perceptions about computing are dictated by the device in front of them, the prevailing opinion is that Windows and Microsoft dominate. However, apart from the daily struggle of unannounced updates, blue screens of death, virus threats, and random dialogue pop-ups, proprietary software – that is, software built with secret computer code – plays little role.

For many, MacOS is the de facto alternative to Windows on the desktop. Yet even that operating system is based on open-source software (BSD-Lite2 and FreeBSD) that is released under terms that allow it to be changed by developers (in this case, Apple employees) without publishing any changes they happen to make.

In a similar tacit role, the Android operating system is a version of open-source Linux that has been extended with proprietary elements such as Google Play Services, which are fiercely protected by Google, a company that charges every phone manufacturer a fee for using them.

Conclusions

From the code that makes up what we sometimes capitalise as The Cloud via every digital waypoint down to the individual sitting at a desk or staring at their phone screen, open-source software is omnipresent.

What Steve Ballmer of Microsoft once described as “a cancer” literally runs the world. In our next article, we’ll examine the advantages of open-source software and services and look at the friction between the competing economic models of proprietary value and open-source philosophy. Born in the era of free love and political open-mindedness, we’ll see how open-source ‘free’ software ideals clash, react and adapt to the free-market economics of 2024.

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