What AirBnB's Outscale-ing Strategy Teaches Us About Cloud Hosting

Just recently, Mike Curtis, Airbnb’s vice president of engineering, had a chat with ZDnet about what it takes to build a business from the ground-up on the cloud. Though the talk lasted only five minutes, Curtis nevertheless offered a number of valuable insights into the nature of cloud computing, and how it fits into an enterprise business model. We’re going to have a look at them - and how you can put them into play in your organization.

Open-Source SaaS Is The Future Of Cloud Operations

First thing’s first: open-source and the cloud are a match made in heaven, especially where SaaS is concerned. According to Curtis, the problem solving process for his organization always considers open-source as a possible solution. And in light of how heavily they make use of the resources from the open-source community, they’ve begun contributing their own tech to the movement.

“I think what we’re really trying to do with the technology that we’re building at Airbnb is create great connections between people,” Curtis explains. “Data’s really at the center of that, because data’s at the center we have to be really sophisticated in the data tools we build and use. We’ve started contributing back to the open-source community with our own data tools.”

Currently, cloud computing and open-source have a rather strange relationship. As noted by Cloudera’s Mike Olson, nothing’s really proprietary anymore - the majority of applications on the market are community-developed. At the same time, however, we’ve not seen anything to the tune of multi-million dollar open-source companies. Turning a profit with open source is difficult, if not impossible.

That doesn’t mean open source still isn’t the future of the cloud, though.