Opening up the cloud

Joyent's David Young has written an excellent treatise on why "clouds" (as in cloud computing) should be open and not proprietary. He details nine attributes of an open, "platform as a service" cloud.

My favorite? Young's contention that while an open cloud could lead to everyone "rolling" their own, the rationale behind doing so is, well, not so rational:

If you're writing an application, and you want to be able to achieve tremendous scale, the answer shouldn't be to move off the cloud onto your own "private" cloud of dedicated servers. Of course, if the cloud computer is open, as we've described, you can build your own cloud. It's also true (that) you can generate your own electricity from coal, if you want to bother. But why bother?

This is a fundamental tenet of open-source businesses. There's much that you could do to fork an open-source project and create your own splinter project, but generally, it's not worth the bother.

The Slashdot community piled on to comment on Young's post, with some insightful questions as to the viability of uploading a company's "crown jewels" to the cloud, "for all the world to see." Others suggest that "'cloud computing' is just the latest marketing promotion designed to move us to renting software."

In the wake of all this chatter, many have missed the funding of open-source cloud-computing vendor 10gen. OStatic has a good write-up on the company. Commenting on its revenue model ("Despite the fact that 10gen's software stack is free and open source, hosting and customer service are fee-based"), OStatic's Sam Dean suggests that this may well prove to be the business model of choice for cloud services: make it easy (and free) to develop, but charge for services rendered.

Regardless, I concur with Young that too much is at stake in cloud computing to leave it to proprietary clouds. Why build oneself into a corner? For cloud computing to succeed, it needs to be transparent in its ways and means, so that people won't have to worry about what will happen with their data.

[Reader11]

> For cloud computing to succeed, it needs to be transparent in its ways and means, so that
> people won't have to worry about what will happen with their data.

How about release management?

Opening up the Cloud computing is fantastic idea especially looking at how far Google has come in efforts to build an enormous cloud. Who wouldn't want to leverage GOOG's PaaS? Or throw enterprise apps onto it. Unfortunately / fortunately let's get back to reality.

We may not actually run production enterprise applications on an internet centric cloud for critical business applications. The nice Face book App, Spam App, Twitter and WebShop was nice although it is time to get real. A lot of us including me have now understood the value of the pay-as-you-go computing model.

The good news is that the on-demand model has been available for a while in utility companies and large financial institutions. It's called z/OS on the IBM Mainframe which includes an OS built-in enterprise database DB2 that has been running secure and highly available transactions for decades.

Cloud and Mainframe release management for applications are different. Update a mainframe mission critical application that runs on a single box and your enterprise is up-to-date across all 256 CPU's. This doesn't work with the cloud. According to GOOG distinguished engineer's applications pickup changes eventually over days or weeks. This is unsatisfactory for mission critical applications.

Here are some IBM examples:http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/success/testimonials/index.html

Here are some Google examples:http://appgallery.appspot.com/

Enough smoke and mirrors, if you have GOOG stock it may be time to go short.

Just my 2cents.


JM
http://camsolutionsinc.com/blog
Monitoring-as-a-Service(TM)

[The_Decider]

Not only is cloud computing an extremely stupid name it is history repeating itself as farce. What is amusing is that people who should know better are lapping it up.

It is nothing more than a mainframe. Except for the fact that the "cloud" takes away control of your data and holds it hostage for a monthly fee and is dangling out in the open just taunting hackers to break into it.

It is at best niche, at worst hype. The negatives far outweigh the positives and for many shortsighted people they are going to have to learn by experience why it is a crappy idea. When that happens the damage will be so severe it could potentially destroy corporations. Hey, maybe this is a good idea!

Companies that offer these services love it because they can charge suckers every month to access their data. Companies that buy into this nonsense love it because they think it solves all the issues inherent with running your own system.

Except that it doesn't. It just shifts the problems elsewhere and the "cloud" company that is taking it on has a financial incentive to cut corners and ignore critical areas like security.

[deceylon]

It is not an evil.
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