Missing in the Cloud: package managment

It seems like all of the existing Cloud offerings are missing some kind of package manager system. AMIs require updating like VMs, which can introduce downtime and other complexity.

I dare say that a standard needs to be introduced--or at least a quasi-standard like we see for Linux with Yum, RPM and Synaptic (essentially flavors of the same ideal.)

Since Amazon doesn't currently offer this feature, I wonder what vendor will step in to fill this void. So far all the Cloud app guys have taken different approaches which will certainly introduce some additional complexity related to portability (which also needs to be standardized.)

One of the things I've been noticing is that many of the technical issues related to the Cloud are things that have to become standardized (if not actual standards) in order for adoption to increase. While this is good for Cloud consumers, it will probably subsume much of the work companies have done around differentiated offerings.

It makes me think that there will be a lot of consolidation or dead pool Cloud companies as soon as these standards are established. Any comments or thoughts are welcome.

[kvjacksn]

You are addressing a critical area for the use of cloud computing technologies in the public sector. The Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium is currently addressing their member concerns through discussions around the following topics:

Standardizations Needed
- APIs between Cloud layers (e.g. PaaS and IaaS)
- Interoperability across Clouds
- Interoperability between public Clouds and enterprise systems

Implementation Guidelines
- Best practices for migrating appropriate applications to Cloud environments
- Use cases and patterns for Cloud deployments
- Organizational support with the Enterprise for Cloud Computing

Robust Cloud Operations
- Security of applications and data in public Clouds
- Availability, risk management, and SLAs for public Clouds
- Governance of services across public Clouds and the enterprise

[bstadil]

Do you actually know how AMIs work? What you do is update 1 AMI and then replace your running instances gradually using that updated AMI. The old days day of having to push updates to 100s of machines are over.

Systems like Scalr , Cloud In Code and many other does this relaunch / replacement automatically.

[daverosenberg]

If you are running multiple apps and each AMI is different, how do you see that working?

Scalr uses prebuilt AMIs. Odds are enterprises will roll their own

[bstadil]

Maybe we are talking apples and oranges. Scalr's AMIs are no more pre build than Ubuntu server is pre build. They have a a few AMIs with specific software like Apache or MySql installed. If you want to roll your own you use the base AMI that is Ubuntu server with a few additional scripts. You can use apt-get to install / update as per normal Ubuntu / Debian. Make your own repository with your specific software and you are in business.

If you don't want to use Ubuntu you can use something like Poolparty (http://poolpartyrb.com/) where you have Puppet to do the lifting for you. Why do we need something Cloud specific?