The recent OSCON 2011 event has paved the way for some open source cloud education. The event that highlighted enterprises like OpenStack, VMware and Hadoop created a positive impression in this space. And, little did we know that eBay is an avid fan of the open source cloud. It uses WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (WSO2 ESB) to process over a billion transactions daily.  That consists of $2,000 per second and 24/7 shopping, bidding, checkouts, mobile apps and trading.

A case study published by WSO2 ESB describes how they were able to perform and support the auction giant to serve their colossal clientele worldwide. Founder and CEO of WSO2, Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana discusses how their solutions and eBay capabilities and demands became a perfect fit:

“For eBay, which has over 94 million active users of its marketplace worldwide, success depends on reliable, 24-7 availability of its services. We are excited by eBay’s ability to scale our WSO2 ESBs to meet its global users’ demands. It is strong validation of the lean open source, open standards approach to our WSO2 ESB and to the SOA expertise of our service and support team.”

The unexplored facets of the open source cloud are also rather attractive. Companies that have been involved in the expedition to this space include Dell and Hewlett-Packard. With Dell expanding its OpenStack infrastructure offerings and HP recently joining the OpenStack community as well, the two big names revisit a long-running rivalry.

And for those who envy Facebook and Google for having an in-house cloud computing infrastructure, former NASA CTO Chris Kemp provides a solution for smaller enterprises to build their own private computing system through Nebula. One of the leading open source providers is also working on some improvements. Less than a week ago, Red Hat teamed up with ServiceSource to aid subscription renewals and customer loyalty for its Global Small & Medium Business (SMB).

Open source cloud is an avenue where organizations collaborate and interact. It is a community that put together business’ good practices to work. With cost-savings entailed, commercial solutions will sooner or later see some tough competition in this space.