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Brings the cloud a step closer to cloud adoption!
Best.
Alain
I especially like "Achieving an open marketplace is essentially cloud computing nirvana, and the ideal to which most enterprises should logically strive to achieve" but of course, I'll add onto this that such a nirvana will only be practicably achievable (without loss of strategic control and pricing competition to a technology vendor) if the standards which it is built upon are operational open sourced pieces of code rather than specifications (it's an old post from July'07 but is covers the basics - http://blog.gardeviance.org/2007/07/competition-not-greed-is-good.html)
Such open sourced standards (the equivalent of open design patterns, such as the open SDK for GAE) will allow competition and service innovation through implementation. The standards themselves will insure portability, the open marketplace you describe and hence consumer innovation through componentisation.
As for "I believe this open market is inevitable, as the economics are just too powerful" - well it's either going to be open or we will see government intervention in the field to force it to behave in such a way.
You can create the illusion of open marketplaces with proprietary stack but it is no more than an illusion (see http://blog.gardeviance.org/2008/03/timeo-danaos-et-dona-ferentes.html)
Anyway, good post.
As far as maturity models go - well, you've seen this before and though it's tongue in check, it does have some serious point to it, as always. (see http://blog.gardeviance.org/2008/02/usaasmm-what.html)
Congratulations on the new gig by the way. I'm looking forward to reading more and seeing how this develops.
I'm somewhat surprised, though, to find that mobility isn't included as a separate stage in your model, because without it the later stages in your model aren't possible. Perhaps you intended abstraction to include mobility, but the description only mentions virtualization and vlans.
Just my two cents.
Anyone else have a "feature" of the cloud they'd like to see explicitly called out?
James
Great to hear from you.
Actually, I don't say that open source is the only answer as you can provide the same effect with a proprietary stack. However, what I do say is that open source is the only answer which doesn't involve handing strategic control and pricing competition over to a technology vendor. It's for this reason that I argue that open is the right answer.
I know I sound like a stuck record. I've been going on about this for several years (http://blog.gardeviance.org/2006/10/open-sourcing-zimki.html) and it's almost 17 months since we first crossed paths (http://blog.gardeviance.org/2007/07/competition-not-greed-is-good.html).
How time zooms by.
I still firmly hold the view that portability between providers (at all levels of the computing stack) will become essential for the "cloud" to grow and that in practice such portability will depend upon standards which are operational pieces of open sourced code.
Bert, really good point about the mobility issue as this is an essential part of a marketplace but also an essential part of abstraction and the decoupling of instance to hardware. I did actually think this was part of James' abstraction level.
One final point, obviously whilst the model is a good general concept, the actual development will probably not be so linear.
The development will certainly not be so linear for the market as a whole. However, I contend the most successful companies will go through exactly these stages, at least at the project level. Utility without abstraction and/or automation is possible, but broken at its core (you end up "reserving" physical machines for a specific purpose).
It's possible to speed up the process by acquiring a platform that includes abstraction, automation and utility; doing all of them at once. However, as those of us who have sold those platforms can attest, that's a "big deal" to do at anything larger than the 100-200 server project level. Things go much better at a large scale with clients that already manage abstractions; even better when they have experimented with automating management of those abstractions.
James
- by bethpinson March 2, 2009 1:25 PM PST
- I enjoyed reading your points and also taking in your maturity model. Very interesting. I am interested to watch Cloud Computing mature within large business models. Walter Pinson has a great post on the immaturity of Cloud Computing and how Amazon, Google and Microsoft are trying to figure out how to gain further returns on their investments. This is all very thought provoking stuff to me. <a href="http://www.walterpinson.com/index.php/2009/02/is-cloud-computing-like-teenage-sex/">Is cloud computing like teenage sex?</a>
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