Amazon Web Services is a juggernaut in the infrastructure as a service market, but GoGrid, a midsize IaaS competitor that aims to be the cloud for big data, says it wants to offer an alternative to AWS’s platform. And it’s hoping to do so through open source databases. AWS is a great platform for running its own custom-built proprietary databases, like DynamoDB, its internally-designed NoSQL database, along with Elastic Map Reduce, its Hadoop-like data service. But GoGrid CEO John Keagy says if an organization wants to use a true open source database, like MongoDB, Basho’s Riak, Hadoop or Cassandra, Amazon is not the place to go. ???We want to be an open source alternative,??? he says. ???If you’re not worried about lock-in then use (AWS). If you’re an enterprise that wants to be able to scale indefinitely and have a flexible architecture then you should identify those needs early and embrace an open source architecture.???