Cloud Computing has matured over the past few years with increasing enterprise adoption but it also brings in potential risks in terms of vendor lock-in. There is a school of thought that argues that open protocols and formats triumph over licensing in the cloud based world. In this presentation, I will give an overview of the role of open source in cloud computing and present arguments to show that open source is a critical piece to mitigate any lockin risks in the cloud. I will also show that open source is a necessary condition to ensure a federated cloud ecosystem which I will project as an antidote to natural market monopoly. I will end the presentation with best practices suggestions to take advantage of open source in the cloud and mitigate lockin risks.
This presentation will not require any deep technical expertise and is targeted at both technical and business users.