Red Hat 2019 Enterprise Open Source Survey: Overview of Popular Open Source Projects Across Web Servers, Big Data, Cloud, Storage, Operating Systems, Databases, and Development Tools

The Red Hat 2019 Enterprise Open Source Survey reports that open source software is increasingly embraced by enterprises to avoid reinventing the wheel, accelerate innovation, and reduce costs. The survey, based on interviews with 950 IT leaders worldwide, shows that the majority consider open source strategically important, with over 69% rating it as very or extremely important.

Key findings include a 68% increase in enterprise open‑source usage over the past year and a projected continued rise in the next 12 months. Open source now supports infrastructure modernization, application modernization, and digital transformation, especially in big‑data analytics and database management.

Part 1 – Web Servers

Nginx : High‑performance HTTP and reverse‑proxy server, lightweight memory usage, strong concurrency, often used as a load balancer.

Lighttpd : Lightweight web server optimized for high‑performance sites, low memory and CPU usage, popular in embedded environments.

Tomcat : Open‑source Java servlet container for running JSP and servlet applications.

Apache HTTP Server : The most widely used web server since 1996, supporting Windows, Linux, and macOS.

Part 2 – Big Data & Cloud Computing

Hadoop : Apache’s distributed processing framework, the de‑facto standard for big‑data workloads.

Docker : Open‑source container engine that packages applications for fast, portable deployment, heavily used in big‑data environments.

Spark : In‑memory distributed computing engine, up to 100× faster than Hadoop MapReduce for iterative algorithms.

Storm : Real‑time stream processing system, often described as the real‑time version of Hadoop.

Cloud Foundry : Open‑source PaaS platform supporting multiple languages and frameworks.

CloudStack : Open‑source IaaS cloud platform for public and private clouds.

OpenStack : Comprehensive open‑source cloud management suite for building scalable private and public clouds.

Part 3 – Cloud Storage

GlusterFS : Scalable distributed file system for cloud storage and media streaming.

FreeNAS : Free, open‑source NAS solution based on FreeBSD.

Lustre : High‑performance parallel file system for large‑scale compute clusters.

Ceph : Distributed storage system offering object, block, and file interfaces.

Part 4 – Operating Systems

CentOS : Community‑driven Linux distribution built from Red Hat Enterprise Linux sources.

Ubuntu : Popular Linux distribution with desktop, server, cloud, and IoT editions.

Part 5 – Databases

MySQL : Widely used relational database, open source with commercial editions.

PostgreSQL : Powerful open‑source relational database, foundation for many commercial products.

MongoDB : Document‑oriented NoSQL database offering high scalability.

Cassandra : Distributed NoSQL database designed for massive data sets.

CouchDB : JSON‑document store with HTTP API, developed in Erlang.

Neo4j : Graph database optimized for relationship‑heavy queries.

Part 6 – Development Tools & Components

Bugzilla : Open‑source bug‑tracking system used by many large projects.

Eclipse : Extensible IDE supporting Java, C/C++, PHP, and many plugins.

Ember.js : JavaScript framework for ambitious web applications.

Node.js : Server‑side JavaScript runtime enabling scalable network applications.

React Native : Framework for building native mobile apps with JavaScript and React.

Ruby on Rails : Convention‑over‑configuration web application framework.

Part 7 – Middleware

JBoss : Open‑source Java EE application server providing EJB and servlet support.

Overall, the survey demonstrates that open source has become a cornerstone of enterprise infrastructure, driving innovation in areas such as cloud‑native platforms, big‑data analytics, and modern application development.