John Willis on Open Source

John Willis just made a great post on the Open Source vs. Commercial software for enterprise management:

Now contrast this with the infamous iLike/Puppet story. Last year iLike.com added a new Facebook application to their service and they gained 35k new users in 24 hours and over 700k new users in just a couple of days. Within a three week period they went from 3 million users to 6.7 million users. Less than a year later, they now have 23 million users. Surely, they must have used an industrial strength multi-million dollar provisioning system - 'not'. Their provisioning system was FREE. With the help of a consulting company called HJK they used an open source product called Puppet to manage their server growth. HJK boasts that with a really short services engagement, one or two weeks, they can achieve 10 minute psychical system bare metal installs. On Xen images they can provision a system in two minutes. In other words, for about 15k in services and another 15k for a Puppet maintenance contract, HJK can provide a solution that the Big Four charges over a million plus and they can deliver the solution in two weeks instead of 3 months.

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 | Tags: opensource, puppet, opennms, hjk