Open Source Software on AWS Solution Overview March 2017 Contents Executive Summary .................................................................................................................................................................. 3 Introduction ............................................................................................................................................................................... 3 Why OSS on AWS? ................................................................................................................................................................. 4 What is Open Source Software (OSS)? .............................................................................................................................. 4 Open Source Licensing ........................................................................................................................................................ 4 Open Source Development Process .................................................................................................................................... 4 OSS on AWS Marketplace .................................................................................................................................................. 5 Open Source Software Solutions on AWS Marketplace ....................................................................................................... 5 Development Tools .............................................................................................................................................................. 5 Application Stacks ................................................................................................................................................................ 6 Networking ........................................................................................................................................................................... 6 Security ................................................................................................................................................................................. 7 Storage ................................................................................................................................................................................... 7 Databases .............................................................................................................................................................................. 8 Business Intelligence (BI) Software .................................................................................................................................... 8 High Performance Computing ............................................................................................................................................. 8 Business Software ................................................................................................................................................................ 9 In Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................................................... 9 Executive Summary Open Source Software (OSS) on AWS presents the opportunity for flexibility, scalability, and reliability. OSS saves you time and effort by providing existing code that is economical or free to use. AWS Marketplace makes it easy to locate, procure, and include OSS in your development and testing organizations, as well as to run your business overall. Introduction According to industry research, enterprise use of Open source software (OSS) is on the rise1. More and more corporate-based developers are asking to use available OSS libraries as part of ongoing development efforts at work. These individuals may be using OSS in their own projects (i.e. evenings and weekends), and naturally want to bring to work the tools and techniques that help them elsewhere. Consequently, development organizations in all sectors are examining the case for using open source software for applications within their own IT infrastructures as well as in the software they sell. In this Overview, we'll show you why obtaining your open source software through AWS makes sense from a development perspective. 1 http://www.zdnet.com/article/enterprise-adoption-of-open-source-is-on-the-rise/ Open Source Software on AWS – Solution OverviewFebruary 2017 Why OSS on AWS? Incorporating OSS into your software is fast and easy when you start with AWS Marketplace. It has thousands of Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) containing OSS software and tools that are preconfigured, optimized, and ready to run. What is Open Source Software (OSS)? Open Source Software is the result of code created in a collaborative environment not limited by corporate boundaries. "Open source" means that the code has not been deliberately obscured or protected from direct examination. The code itself is intended to be available for inspection, copying, derivation, and reuse. Open Source Licensing Within the OSS community, the emphasis is on collaboration. OSS is distributed with a variety of licenses attached to it. Most of the OSS licenses in use today are generous; you can use the software freely as long as you reference the license attached to it in your code or in an accompanying text file. A few licenses insist that the free OSS they provide only be incorporated in software that is then free to end users, but that kind of restriction is the exception rather than the rule. You can find a comparison of free and open-source software licenses on Wikipedia. Open Source Development Process Because open source software is generally developed in independent communities of participants, acquiring and managing software versions is usually done through online code repositories. But AWS Marketplace lets you skip this process and directly launch the Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) with the OSS you want. Most software can be launched with 1-Click. With code coming from disparate sources, it can be challenging to get the code libraries and development tools to work well together. As a result, a number of companies began producing combinations or "stacks" of the most popular open source software which can be download and installed, or launched into a cloud service like AWS. Companies such as TurnKey and Bitnami use their OSS experts to configure and optimize these code stacks so that the software works well together. Many of these solution stacks are pre-configured and ready-to-run on AWS. These companies stay current on new releases of the OSS, and update their stacks accordingly as soon as new versions are available. Some of these companies also offer cloud hosting infrastructures as a paid service to make it even easier to launch and manage cloud-based servers. As an example, one of the most popular combinations of open source software is the LAMP stack, which consists of a Linux distribution, Apache Web Server, a MySQL database, and the PHP programming library. You can select a generic LAMP stack based on the Linux distribution you prefer, then install your favorite development tools and libraries. You would then add to it any adjustments to the underlying software that you need or want to make for your application to run as expected. For example, you may want to change the memory allocations for the application, or change the maximum file upload size in the PHP settings. Page 4 of 10 Open Source Software on AWS – Solution OverviewFebruary 2017 You could also select an OSS application stack that contains the LAMP elements plus a single application such as WordPress, Moodle, or Joomla!. These stacks would be configured with optimal settings for that individual application so that it runs smoothly, with sufficient memory and disk allocations based on the application requirements. This is where stack vendors excel in providing added value to the basic software provisioning. Figure 1 - LAMP Stack with WordPress OSS on AWS Marketplace AWS Marketplace is one of the largest sites for obtaining and deploying OSS tools, applications, and servers. AWS Partners use Amazon EC2 instances as the basis for their application (server or desktop), install the required operating system, and add their applications. Then they create AMIs that you can launch with everything preconfigured and ready to go. You pay Amazon EC2 usage costs plus per hour (or per month or annual) licensing fees (if any) directly through your AWS account. For some AMIs, you can even bring your own license (BYOL). You can see in advance what your costs will be, depending on the instance type you select. As a result, using AWS Marketplace is the fastest and most reliable way to get your OSS software up and running. Open Source Software Solutions on AWS Marketplace AWS Marketplace has over 30 categories of software available as AMIs that you can launch as EC2 instances. Here are some of the most popular categories containing open source software. Most examples listed are free and open source; some have hourly fees for the software that are still economical. Development Tools Scenario: Setting up a development department infrastructure using OSS. When it comes to storing the code, tracking issues, and automated testing, some of the most popular development tools available have come from the open source community. AWS Marketplace has AMIs with your favorite tools preconfigured, so that you