Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : sam ramji, Management

Managing Towards Open

Sam Ramji — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 19:59:00 GMT

I have the privilege of interacting almost every day with technical and business experts who are creating the future of software—including both core engineering teams at Microsoft and thought leaders across a broad spectrum of open source communities. Especially in the last few months, I’ve been able to take more time to articulate where I think this is going – such as writing how open source has influenced Windows Server 2008 and participating in Infoworld’s roundtable on the state of open source.

I think that many people are seeing that the interrelationship between Microsoft and open source is being changed fundamentally (and for mutual benefit).

Today, Bob Muglia and Brad Anderson announced that System Center will have the ability to deliver automated management across heterogeneous IT environments, such as UNIX and Linux. What I see as a best practice for commercial and community engagement with open source technology plays a big part in this.

Specifically, Microsoft will deliver an agent infrastructure and management packs (MPs) for monitoring Linux and UNIX platforms for System Center Operations Manager 2007. Early partners like Xandros and Quest are delivering cross-platform MPs for MySQL and Apache, and Oracle, respectively. Microsoft and Novell are collaborating on the SUSE Linux Enterprise MP.

The agent infrastructure Microsoft is building to interoperate with UNIX and Linux is built leveraging industry standards and open source such as WS-Management and OpenPegasus. Pegasus is an open-source implementation of the DMTF CIM and WBEM standards coded in C++, designed to be portable, and licensed under an MIT license, and work is underway to integrate with the newly DMTF ratified WS-Management standard. Pegasus already ships as part of major Linux and UNIX distros.

It simply makes great technical and business sense to cooperate with the OpenPegasus community to build upon an industry-standards based, cross-platform technology. Just as important, however, is preserving the virtuous cycle of contribution, benefit, and subsequent contribution: Microsoft is joining the OpenPegasus Steering Committee. The agent technology—being built will be contributed back to the community under the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL), an OSI approved open source license.

I greatly appreciate Allen Brown's positive comments (Allen is the President and CEO for The Open Group) and the support and education we’ve received from the sponsors and maintainers of Pegasus. He said:

“We are pleased to have Microsoft join the OpenPegasus Steering Committee and welcome their commitment as a positive step for the global open source development community. Since The Open Group initiated the OpenPegasus project seven years ago, it has been deployed across a wide range of IT platforms worldwide. We look forward to Microsoft’s active participation in the continuing development of the project.”

Today’s announcement and the business and technical decisions made by the System Center team are a great example of the fact that commercial innovation, industry partnerships, and open source participation can all work together to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. My enthusiasm and excitement—and my applause for the System Center team, partners like Xandros, Quest, and Novell, and the OpenPegasus community—is tempered solely by my conviction this is not the only or last example of the best of Microsoft, partners, and open source growing together. This is a great day – and there are more great days to come.

How open source has influenced Windows Server 2008

Sam Ramji — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:00:00 GMT

When I think about what works really well in open source development and technology, the following things stand out:

Modular architectures
You can find these wherever you see participation at scale – and often a rearchitecture to a more modular system precedes expanded participation. Great examples of this are Firefox, OpenOffice, and X11 – from both the historical rearchitecture and the increased participation that resulted. The Apache HTTP server and APR are good examples that have been modular for as long as I can recall.
Programming language agnostic
A given project uses a consistent language, but there are no rules on what languages are in scope or out of scope. Being open to more languages means opportunity to attract more developers – the diversity of PHP/Perl/Python/Java has been a core driver in the success of a number of projects including Linux.
Feedback-driven development
The “power user” as product manager is a powerful shift in how to build and tune software – and this class of users includes developers who are not committing code back, but instead submitting CRs and defects – resulting in a product that better fits its end users.
Built-for-purpose systems
Most frequently seen in applications of Linux, the ability to build a system that has just what is needed to fulfill its role and nothing else (think of highly customizable distributions like Gentoo or BusyBox, as well as fully custom deployments).
Sysadmins who write code
The ability of a skilled system administrator to write the “last mile” code means that they can make a technology work in their particular environment efficiently and often provide good feedback to developers. This is so fundamental to Unix and Linux environments that most sysadmins are competent programmers.
Standards-based communication
Whether the standard is something from the IETF or W3C, or simply the implementation code itself, where these are used projects are more successful (think of Asterisk and IAX2) and attract a larger ecosystem of software around them.

So where did we apply these ideas to the development of Windows Server 2008?

Modular architectures was applied in multiple areas, but the one that stands out most to me is Internet Information Server 7 (IIS7). IIS7 has been rearchitected for flexibility as 40 individual modules, enable more to be written by community developers or delivered as out-of-band releases. This has already enabled performance improvements and independent evolution, and I expect to see further enhancements.
Programming language agnostic is something we’ve delivered on with support for PHP on IIS7 and the enhancements to FastCGI (which can be used by any of the P* languages). We set a goal of having PHP certified on Windows Server 2008, and we’ve achieved that. We’ll continue to improve runtime, security, and manageability support for non-.NET languages and the applications that are built on them, as well as testing the full stacks of PHP-based applications running on Windows Server, IIS, and SQL Server.
Feedback-driven development based on developer and customer trials (RDPs, TAPs, and Betas in our process) led to a range of “feature completion” developments that connected different components – like connecting Windows Firewall with Active Directory central policy, and the end-to-end improvements in SMB 2.0. Features like the RODC (Read-Only Domain Controller) have become more and more solid through experience with early alpha and beta customer deployments, and requests to enforce things like BitLocker encryption of user disks from a central authority have achieved full support.
Built-for-purpose systems such as DNS, DHCP, file and web serving can be created through wizard-driven configuration thanks to Windows Server Core. The goal of having a minimum attack surface and a small hardware footprint, inspired by the capabilities mentioned above, yet achievable by a broad base of admins has been achieved. Additionally, this has created an opportunity for Windows admins to become much more knowledgeable about the low-level structure of the operating system.
Sysadmins who write code are first-class citizens in the PowerShell-driven infrastructure. We’ve increased Windows administrators’ opportunity to master the full surface area of WMI and demonstrate that mastery in reusable, low-level scripts. As we evolve this to support multiple language bindings and bash aliasing, this should become a comfortable home for highly skilled sysadmins.
Standards-based communication such as in CardSpace (with support for X.509, SAML, Kerberos tokens, and more) and the Web Services stack (not only are all 38 Web Services standard under the Open Specification promise, but our implementations have achieved a high level of interop with Apache’s Axis web services stack), and beta support for emerging standards like Xen virtualization represent a small subset of the standards built into Windows Server 2008.

Overall, we’ve learned and continue to learn from open source development principles. These are making their way into the mindset, development practices, and ultimately into the products we bring to market.

I’ve focused here on “what Microsoft has learned from Open Source” – and ironically, I’ve agreed to do a panel at OSBC on 3/25 with Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation on “what Open Source can learn from Microsoft”. As all of the different organizations in IT continue to evolve, we’ll learn from each others’ best practices and make increasingly better software. As in science, this incremental improvement will move all of us forward.

Hyperic: Java-based Cross-platform Management

Sam Ramji — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 18:38:00 GMT

I had the opportunity to sit down with Javier Soltero, CEO of Hyperic last month in San Francisco at the OSBC. We had a great discussion, which I opened bluntly by saying, “You don’t need to tell me about your software; I’ve seen it, my lab team thinks it’s cool, and we’re impressed.” He was happy to hear it but probably not surprised.

One of the obvious pros of the open source model (like the freeware model of the 90’s) is that you can get what you want without calling anyone or firing off a “please contact me” request to the company’s sales department. Another equally obvious pro is that prospective customers can really walk through the product’s architecture and actual implementation to make sure that the marketing promises (“marketechture”) actually line up with the product being described.

Kishi Malhotra and Stephen Zarkos – the OSSL’s experts on manageability – did a comprehensive teardown of Hyperic and a range of other open source management technologies (such as Nagios and OpenPegasus), which they’ll be posting in the next few days. What they found about Hyperic is that it does a great job of making a low-footprint, easily adaptable management technology and is commercializing it in an open source model. We thought that SIGAR, their agent API, was particularly clever.

Javier and Doug MacEachern (their CTO, and a maintainer for mod_perl among other achievements) spent some time on a podcast with me last week – if you’re interested in hearing their reasons for building Hyperic, how it compares to Nagios, and what they learned in taking their product open source, listen in. They’ll be available to answer questions on this post as well – leave a comment if you’re curious about something they’re doing.

Also, drop us a note and let us know if you interested in more interviews with open source and interoperability technology leaders on Port 25.

Open Source Management - Commercial or Libre

jcannon — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 17:17:00 GMT

Free open source management projects have existed for years, as illustrated by nagios and webmin, and exist as BYOC (bring your own console) free alternatives to commercial management systems from HP, BMC, CA, IBM and Microsoft. In the last few years, we've seen a rise in commercial software companies moving to support Linux and heterogeneous environments - including but not limited to Centrify, Vintela (Quest) and Centeris, three vendors with whom we've worked in the lab.

It makes good economic sense to make money managing a free product - after all, Microeconomics 101 will tell you that commoditizing your complements maximizes revenue. Sell a database? Then make the operating system and application server free. IBM's move into open source can be seen in this perspective (free operating systems on for-profit hardware and services) as can HP's (with management software revenues thrown into the mix). The same logic should apply to management, especially given the relative lack of enterprise-class open source management software. While nagios is impressive, the fact that it has been used to manage 5,000 node systems alone does not make it enterprise-class.

Recently the Open Management Consortium was founded to unite free/libre open source management projects around a common vision for what management systems should be capable of, and under a common philosophy of open source software. Founders include Qlusters, EmuSoftware, Zenoss, and Ayamon. They also have a list of OSS management projects. Notably, they don't mention OpenSSI as a cluster management technology.

Open Source can be taken to apply to management in several ways:

Console
Monitor
Agents
Adapters

Each of these layers is open to displacement by open source software, some more easily than others. Agents and adapters seem to me to be the best fit for the typical open source development model - where it's easier to serve the long tail of different endpoints than under standard commercial rules. Consoles and monitors, while at the most basic levels of logging, parsing, alerting, and displaying are well-understood, are areas of deep research and increasingly rarified technology. The developments in the area of event aggregation and scalable management UIs require significant directed investment (and Matt Asay has disagreed with me on this before) in which commercial software companies have an advantage.

A few Port 25 readers have contacted me about building open source integrations between Microsoft products and OSS management technology - as well as OSS projects and Microsoft management technology. For both of these categories, it makes good sense to me and I'd like to see them developed at www.codeplex.com, where we've built an infrastructure for the community to build open source projects.

In the management arena, where we spend significant time in the lab testing different approaches, I'd be happy to spend money and time helping to test or develop projects on Codeplex. Drop me a note if you have something cooking and would like some help or direction.

Cheers,
Sam