Comments on: Is Google's BigTable too private?

During a panel discussion at the Structure conference, the issues of lock-in and standards for Google's cloud-computing platform fire up some open-infrastructure conversation.

[fredtheviking]

If I am Google or Amazon, I doubt I would want to make it easy for customer to leave. I understand the author point that giving the user more flexiblity with Google Big Table would be nice to have, but it not clear it's a must have for customer. Also, this Google and Amazon you are talking about, the risk being stuck them isn't really that bad. But I can apprience what Joyent is doing.

[Tony McCune]

I don't see the leader of the pack at the table. Amazon's EC2 solution is Xen/Linux based. We could migrate off it if we had to but the cost savings far outweighs the risks.
http://www.amazon.com/Success-Story-DigitalChalk-AWS/b?ie=UTF8&node=401671011&me=A36L942TSJ2AJA

[fangodango]

I think Microsoft's offering in this area is slightly more thought out and well developed. To support Hoffman's point, he is really talking about choice and I think choice is a very important part of the equation. Any company that decides to move to cloud based services needs to have an assurance that they can move the data repository at any point be it owned by the platform provider, another third-party or themselves. Microsoft has the platform tools today to enable these scenarios. I think once it is established that portability/migration exists then it won't be about "If cloud or not" but "and cloud".

[ElmoKajaky]

Why do people care about cloud computing, again? Seems silly...

[yassola]

If I were google or amazone, I would not let your export data, otherwise users will go away, I do think it's stupid to allow people export data out , like what LEXST DATABASE is doing.