CenturyLink has contributed the source code of three of its tools to the open source community. The three projects are Chef provisioning driver for vSphere, Lorry.io and ImageLayers.

The Chef provisioning driver for vSphere has been loaded on Github and includes two examples, for developers to modify and use. It’s purpose is to simplify the process of provisioning Chef nodes on VMWare vSphere infrastructure.

Lorry.io. provides a browser based validator for the creation, composing and validating of Docker Compose YAML files. A Docker-compose.yml file can be imported or created from scratch. Alternatively it is supports the import of Panamas templates and will convert them to Docker-compose.yml files. Panamax is a Docker management platform that was release by CenturyLink on open source in the last year.

The final project ImageLayers.io is a CenturyLink Cloud hosted utility and provides a visualisation in a browser of user specified Docker Images and their layers. It allows users to look at the composition of Docker Images and compare two images. This helps to determine which configuration will be better in specific use cases.

Jared Wray CenturyLink
Jared Wray CenturyLink

With Jared Wray, senior vice president of platforms at CenturyLink and CTO of Cloud at CenturyLink at the helm it seems that CenturyLink will continue to deploy open source utilities to the Cloud. Wray commented: “The embrace of open-source technologies within the enterprise continues to rise, and we are proud to be huge open-source advocates and contributors at CenturyLink”

“We believe it’s critical to be active in the open-source community, building flexible and feature-rich tools that enable new possibilities for developers.”

Wray has been personally active for some time in Open Source and was one of the originators of the Iron Foundry open source Platform as a Service (PaaS) project while CEO of Tier 3. It seems his vision for open source has been drawn into CenturyLink who have made several open source contributions including Dray, used to manage Docker workflows; a Cloud Total Cost of Ownership tool; and a Cloud Cost Estimator tool for CenturyLink Cloud.

While traditionally CenturyLink is seen as a Telco its move into the application space has been gathering momentum. Appfog, a public cloud PaaS provider, was purchased in 2013, has now been integrated into CenturyLink. Based on Cloud Foundry, the open source PaaS platform developed by VMWare and now owned by Pivotal, a joint venture by EMC, VMware and General Electric. This latest move sees CenturyLink widen its appeal and increases goodwill but one questions whether it will actually increase loyalty to CenturyLink itself.

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