Embracing Open Source will help enterprises stay ahead of the AI game

Soma Tah

From being looked upon as an alternative, open source is now considered the de facto architecture and engine of innovation. An increasing number of the tech disruptors around the world have started to embrace the open-source environment for the flexibility and freedom of choice offered by it.

The 2016 North Bridge & Black Duck open source study findings positioned open source as today’s preeminent architecture, the foundation for nearly all applications, operating systems, cloud computing, databases and big data.

As Cloud and High Performance Computing(HPC) have become mainstream, we have seen an increasing number of disruptive companies are using Artificial intelligence(AI) to transform people’s lives in interesting, but very subtle ways. For example, companies are using AI and advanced algorithms to learn the consumer behavior in order to serve them better. A certain degree of openness is embraced by almost all of them. Some tech majors such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Facebook also have made parts of their AI systems open for further explorations and advancements.

Kingsley Wood, Director, Infrastructure Business Group, Asia Pacific - Red Hat, said, “The interesting thing about the open source approach is that many people from the community can contribute a lot of fresh ideas, which can help identify problems quicker.”

“AI, machine learning, Big Data, these are all fine-grain specialities and you can work effectively with these technologies only if you have the base operating system reliably provided,” said he.

For example, the service requests handled by any bank in the last two days of a month and in any other two days in the middle of the month are not aways the same. People have to clear their paychecks, pay their bills, etc. at the end of the month, which obviously creates a spike in traffic and increases the load on their infrastructure. But the traffic gradually drops and remains comparatively low on the other days of the month and that lowers the load on infrastructure as well. If your infrastructure can not elastically adapt to such abrupt changes in demands, then you are way behind in the game.

As AI has already made significant inroads into the enterprises, the demand for such rapid scaling is going to grow even further. Being data-and-computed intensive, AI also demands an intelligent as well as highly scalable IT infrastructure to churn the vast amounts of data that goes to power the deep learning systems.

Integrating AI capabilities into the existing IT infrastructure will be a challenging proposition and depending on a single solution vendor for that might be cost-prohibitive and not viable also in the long run. As going by the speed of the ongoing development into the realm of AI, it is needless to say that the day is not far when the AI-enabled Infrastructure will be an important part of the any enterprise stack.

In that scenario, open source can enable enterprises to leverage the rich community of developers and user base, who might know about the problem already and hence can help in resolving them quickly.

With the acquisition and integration of Ansible in its solution portfolio, Red Hat took a significant step forward to create frictionless IT, which is considered crucial for AI projects as well. Ansible is a game-changing agentless open source automation technology for the management of IT environments at scale. IT automation tools can help in meeting the rapid scaling needs easily without imposing any extra burden on the IT people, and takes the pain out of managing complex and diverse environments as well.