The implications of Google’s prized Borg software becoming open-sourced

Identifying performance issues, showing trends and establishing baseline for various processes to make SQL server performance faster might not be an open source idea but Google is making its blueprint public towards boosting its cloud. Right from the beginning, there has been attempts and desire to recreate Borg, as the blueprint is known, into an open source kind of project.

Borg is essentially the software tool driving Google, from Google Maps, Gmail to Google Search, allowing the seamless parceling of computing tasks throughout the global network. Borg has been a secret for many years and a well kept secret at that. However, the desire to have its blueprint shared has always been there, although not every part of it, with the rest of the web.

On the other hand, the idea of sharing the secret that keeps Google running and making it open source was not well received. The project was finally approved by Google and now referred to as Kubernetes. As a result, the last one year has seen over 370 coders making “commits”, over 12,500 of them, to the project. In fact, a huge number of the coders hardly work with or for Google, particularly the top six Kubernetes contributors.

This means a number of things across the board.

Notable shift
The tool indicates a major shift in Google since it seeks to compete with such companies as Microsoft and Amazon in cloud computing investment. Google had been closely guarding its main technologies and giant empire online and Borg is a very good example. While the same still happens today, Google can now be considered a serious company in cloud computing, which is inviting developers and companies to run and build their websites plus other web apps on its infrastructure. Google has added some additional give and take on the web and across the software world.

Pushing developers to Google Compute Engine
The project backers had from the start seen the project as the perfect way of pushing more developers on the Google Compute Engine. Kubernetes offers a way of running code efficiently through cloud services including a better way of allowing physical machine organizations to operate their individual data centers. Sharing the Borg code is so important to Google and cloud is currently a major imperative for very many companies, Google included. They must operate in a certain new way and their expertise needed to be brought into the open source community.

Large change in cloud computing
While the move to have Borg software open sourced is the result of the huge change in cloud computing, developers will be able to build software readily across diverse types of machines with open source will be used to do this. This makes for more complicated issues with a hybrid-cloud work environment. Simple jobs like printing, will need more computing power than previously allocated. Essentially, running proprietary tools throughout diverse machines is very expensive and molding this to fit certain needs is rather hard. Whether it’s providing such services as building software, Google Compute Engine or any other, it’s very important for any cloud company to turn to open source. Already Microsoft has seen how important this is, including EMC and VMware.

Encouraging use of cloud services
The release of Kubernetes is meant to encourage many people to continue or begin using Google App Engine and Google Computer Engine cloud computing services. Thus ensures that running and building software by companies is possible devoid of the use of machines of their own.

Beyond Google universe
Kubernetes is allowing the overseeing of machines running on other cloud services competing with Google such as Rackspace or Amazon, including internal private centers of data. Kubernetes is allowing companies to pool processing power in an effective way from diverse places, which is more like stitching diverse machines into a single big computer.

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada
Robert Cordray
Robert Cordray
Robert Cordray is a former business consultant and entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience and a wide variety of knowledge in multiple areas of the industry. He currently resides in the Southern California area and spends his time helping consumers and business owners alike try to be successful.

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