Needless to say, DevOps as a practice is largely fueled by open source. The growth and popularity of open source tools such as Elasticsearch, Kubernetes and others are driven largely by the increased flexibility, innovation and familiarity of options. While this isn’t news for developers (65% of which are active open source contributors), leading cloud providers are taking notice, as they try to increase their appeal to DevOps engineers to finally win the cloud wars.
Currently, AWS is the leading cloud provider. However, with Azure gaining more and more momentum, all three major cloud providers are scrambling to offer their customers the best open source options and empower them to use the tools they know and love in a manner that is convenient and native to their cloud environments.
Going Big on Open Source
Today, Logz.io and Microsoft Azure announced that our ELK-as-a-service will now be offered on Microsoft Azure. Logz.io offers an intelligent machine data analytics platform built on ELK and Grafana, two of the most popular open source monitoring and troubleshooting tools. Our platform enables engineers to easily deploy, run and scale ELK without the hassle and pain of maintaining and managing the stack themselves.
Now, with Logz.io for Azure, users can use open source ELK as a highly integrated experience in Azure. The new offering includes seamless integrations to various Azure services, out-of-the-box Azure dashboards, built-in alerting and crowdsourced machine learning capabilities.
The integration between Logz.io and Azure is not only significant in the context of the cloud wars, but in the culture of Microsoft itself. While the company was previously associated with a more proprietary structure, they have made tremendous strides in recent years toward empowering open source by opening its .NET framework and Azure SDK, as well as their acquisition of GitHub.
According to Julia Liuson, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s developer division: “At Microsoft, we see open source as a major driver of innovation within the engineering community. Since we strive to empower our customers and facilitate their success, it is important to us to meet them where they are by making it easy to access and use open source tools. Our partnership with Logz.io will strengthen Microsoft Azure ties with the developer community, enabling teams to easily build and monitor their products using ELK.”
AWS vs. Google Cloud
Microsoft’s investment in ELK comes just in time to provide an answer to its competitors, AWS and Google Cloud. Just two months ago, AWS announced Open Distro for Elasticsearch, which in their own words “is a value-added distribution of Elasticsearch that is 100% open source (Apache 2.0 license) and supported by AWS.” The new offering includes managed Elasticsearch and Kibana along with features such as built-in alerting, security and more. This was AWS’ most recent appeal to the engineering community, offering one of the most popular monitoring tools as a managed service on AWS.
Following this release, Google Cloud announced its own open source offering featuring integrations with leading companies such as Elastic, MongoDB, Confluent and more. According to Google, the purpose of these integrations was to “provide users with a seamless user experience and the ability to easily leverage these open-source technologies in Google’s cloud.”
Is Open Source the Future?
If what’s happening between cloud vendors is any indication of future trends in the engineering space, it seems imperative that all organizations targeting DevOps teams must consider how they’ll fuel open source and empower its vast user community. At Logz.io, we are proud to be part of this initiative.
Overall, it is great to see the strides large organizations are taking in furthering the interests of the developer community and enabling them to work using the tools, methodologies and strategies that best suit their workflows and ideals.