Similar to traditional on-premises environments, customers will have a large range of software options to choose from when starting on their cloud native journey. As pointed out already, licensing considerations are critical to understand before making any decision. Open source software can be very effective in the cloud, and often the preferred method for companies to fill important gaps in their technology landscape. Whether it's using some of the fantastic projects found at the Apache Foundation or from other locations, customers should consider these options when making decisions.

For example, a very popular security information and event management (SIEM) solution is the ISV Splunk, which will do large-sale log aggressions and event management. While often considered best of breed for these types of solutions, there are some alternative open source projects that are similar, specifically the ELK stack (short for ElasticSearch, Logstash, Kibaba). Both achieve similar results, each with different pricing models that can be attractive to different types of customers. Often the open source alternative will come with strong community support but a less polished configuration model, causing the customer to need skills in the technology to set it up and make it run effectively.

It's also important to remember that with open source software, the physical resources (for example, virtual instances, storage, networking, and so on) are still going to have costs associated while in use; only the software will be free.