Coop's Corner

As cloud computing edges forward in fits and starts, one recurring question is whether more companies will opt to put their IT services on so-called public clouds or private ones.

The former are available to any individual or business, which essentially rent out a menu of scalable resources. That's a popular option for startups and fledgling outfits, which can't afford to sink much money into paying for an extensive hardware infrastructure. Private clouds, on the other hand, typically offer stronger security and reliability and are thought to have special appeal to IT managers keen on keeping their use restricted to company employees.

Now LongJump, which sells an on demand enterprise applications platform, is licensing technology that will let IT managers build apps on a cloud platform as a service and keep local control of their data. LongJump's CEO, Pankaj Malviya, said the product also will reduce the time involved in a company creating a private cloud where it can build build customized applications.

The company is also hoping to reach software developers, who want to put out branded software-as-a-service products. Malviya said that this is a group which heretofore has been priced out of the market for "comprehensive, multi-tenant platforms." In other words, the users and applications will share an infrastructure and code base that will be managed centrally.

Malviya said LongJump would charge on a CPU basis, rather than by the number of users. The price ranges between $60,000 to $240,000, depending on the platform and range of options selected.

LongJump is one of the signatories to the Open Cloud Manifesto unveiled on Monday.

What's it gonna be: my cloud or yours?

If you have the stomach, revisit the heated debates over how Unix or Web services should develop. Strong companies and strong personalities dominated the arguments. Ultimately, Web services flourished while the Unix standard fragmented, ending up with proprietary versions that were too weak to compete against Linux years later.

Such are the birth pangs that attend every interesting new technology. But while they say experience is a teacher, any lessons seem destined to land on deaf ears when it comes to the computer industry. At the dawn of the cloud-computing era, we're about to witness key tech companies again pull in opposite directions.

A document (PDF) making its way onto the Web--the "Open Cloud Manifesto"--makes the case for the vision of what it terms "an open cloud."

"We as industry participants must work together to ensure that the cloud remains as open as all other IT technologies. Some might argue that it is too early to discuss topics such as standards, interoperability, integration, and portability. Although this is a time of great innovation for the cloud-computing community, that innovation should be guided by the principles of openness outlined in this document. We argue that it is exactly the right time to begin the work to build the open cloud."

Nice sentiment, but they'll have to do it without Microsoft and Amazon. Both companies have rejected the initiative. Microsoft, which says that its Azure platform is sufficiently open, slammed the way the manifesto came together and dunned its backers for their take-it-or-leave-it approach.

"It appears to us that one company, or just a few companies, would prefer to control the evolution of cloud computing, as opposed to reaching a consensus across key stakeholders (including cloud users) through an "open" process. An open Manifesto emerging from a closed process is at least mildly ironic."

Amazon, which is building a fabulously profitable business as a cloud services supplier, was even more blunt about why it opted not to sign on the dotted line:

"But, what we've heard from customers thus far, customers who are really committed to using the cloud, is that the best way to illustrate openness and customer flexibility is by what you actually provide and deliver for them."

I can't say which group is on the side of the angels. The document in question is actually a starting point in what its signatories hope will turn into a broader conversation about how to break down barriers to adoption and foster wider acceptance in the IT world. (The full roster of participating companies was not immediately available.)

On the surface, there's not much to find upsetting or controversial with the document. Frankly, it reads like one of those anodyne diplomatic communiques published after a meeting between heads of state. To wit:

"This document does not intend to define a final taxonomy of cloud computing or to charter a new standards effort. Nor does it try to be an exhaustive thesis on cloud architecture and design. Rather, this document speaks to CIOs, governments, IT users, and business leaders who intend to use cloud computing and to establish a set of core principles for cloud providers. Cloud computing is still in its early stages, with much to learn and more experimentation to come. However, the time is right for the members of the emerging cloud-computing community to come together around the notion of an open cloud."

Not exactly the equivalent of "Give me liberty or give me death." But the split represents the divide between a couple of (important) companies with a head start in cloud computing and a larger cohort of wannabes anxious to avoid vendor lock-in. Sound familiar? It should. We've been here before--many times.

Cloud computing, or more precisely, cloud computing in its latest incarnation, is still in a state of becoming. So there's still time and room to figure out how things should work to the betterment of individuals and businesses. What's needed now is the intervention of cooler heads who can rise above the fray to figure out how to heal the rift before it widens.

Henry Kissinger doing anything these days?

Add Canonical to the roster of companies offering technology to help enterprise customers build their own cloud-computing setups. But unlike most of the better-known players in this nascent market, the twist here is that the technology will be supplied by an open-source shop.

Canonical is best known as being the commercial sponsor of the Ubuntu operating system, a computer operating system based on Debian GNU/Linux. With 8 million to 10 million users, Ubuntu has enjoyed success in no small part because of its ease of use.

Next month the company will offer the first details on plans to roll out cloud-computing services to its customers. At this point, details remain scarce but management isn't planning to reinvent the wheel. Instead, the company is going to adopt the same approach it used to promote Ubuntu as an open-source operating system.

The basic idea will be to supply the technology on an open source basis and then let users alter it to fit their individual company needs. At the same time, Canonical hopes to benefit from a developer feedback loop, which presumably would contribute any bug fixes or suggestions on how to advance the offerings. Any profits would roll in through the later sale of ancillary support and add-on services to customers.

This is just the latest announcement in what's fast becoming a crowded and super-hyped field. The umbrella terms refers to the concept of allowing access to computing power and storage space by connecting over the Internet. Most recently, Sun Microsystems last week offered details on a plan to enable developers, start-ups, and even students access a cloud-computing infrastructure.

Update 8:49 a.m. PDT: Sun has made its official announcement and provided a link to its cloud computing site.

During the Internet bubble era, Sun Microsystems profited as one of the big suppliers of networking computing technology to IT. Now it's hoping to similarly benefit from another tech trend as the computer industry slowly migrates toward cloud computing.

On Wednesday, Sun will announce its entry into the cloud-computing business with a public cloud service aimed developers, students, and start-ups. It will also detail its plans for an open cloud-computing infrastructure, for public or private clouds.

Sun will be making the announcement at its CommunityOne developer event taking place in New York City.

As part of the announcement, Sun plans to release a set of open application programming interfaces as part of its positioning that--and here I'm quoting from the official press release--"Sun is fostering collaboration and interoperability among other clouds and cloud-based applications."

At the core of the Sun Cloud Compute Service are the Virtual Data Center (VDC) capabilities acquired in Sun's purchase of Q-layer in January 2009, which provide everything an individual or team of developers needs to build and operate a datacenter in the cloud. The VDC provides a unified, integrated interface to stage an application running on any operating system within a cloud, including OpenSolaris, Linux or Windows. It features a drag-and-drop method, in addition to APIs and a command line interface for provisioning compute, storage and networking resources via any Web browser. The Sun Cloud Storage Service supports WebDAV protocols for easy file access and object store APIs that are compatible with Amazon's S3 APIs. By leveraging pre-packaged Virtual Machine Images (VMIs) of Sun's open source software, developers will be able to easily deploy applications to the Sun Cloud.

PR spin or not, it's still a bold change of pace for Sun, which will now be competing against the likes of Amazon and Google, a couple of companies that have fast established their bonafides as successful suppliers of cloud-computing services. But this shouldn't surprise anyone. Actually, Sun has been signaling plans to enter the cloud business for several months now. In fact, the company formed its cloud-computing business last summer and has been preparing the ground with periodic briefings for press and analysts.

In an interview, Dave Douglas, the senior VP of cloud computing at Sun, acknowledged the looming clash with the established names in cloud computing but suggested there was ample room for a number of competing offerings to coexist.

"I really believe there will be very many clouds tuned up for particular industries, and niches or countries," he said. "We're basically giving developers their own development data center."

Douglas said that Sun's cloud offering will feature a service payment model but said pricing details would not be immediately available until later in the first half of the year.

For the last decade, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff has promoted his pet idea that traditional application software was destined for obsolescence.

He was a few years early, but Benioff understood computer history better than his detractors.

Most of the hosted on-demand application vendors, or ASPs as we called them back then, crashed and burned. Not only did they burn through money at a frightful clip, but the technology they used was thin, relying on single-tenant, non-scalable computing architecture models that left a trail of dissatisfied customers.

In the post-Internet bubble world, however, the proliferation of cheap hardware combined with an abundance of Internet infrastructure created ripe conditions for Benioff and others to figure out how to do it the right way. Oracle, Microsoft and other big software makers weren't in immediate peril, but they caught on to the new reality: More customers were accessing the Internet to subscribe to programs like customer management software

With roots in computer clustering and grid computing, the technology that first sprouted during the ASP era of the late 1990s is now the computing topic du jour. There's understandable reason for the excitement but advocates of cloud computing now have to battle the inevitable hype that attends any major technology shift.

So what is cloud computing? The definition game can lead you down a rabbit's hole. After all, isn't the Web itself a form of cloud computing? As Greg Cruey noted, we're all accessing Web pages that reside in the cloud. But the buzz in 2009 about cloud computing isn't so much about a computing architecture as it is a style of computing.

For the IT world, the promise is a a faster, easier, and more affordable way to provision computing resources. Gartner thinks about cloud computing as a system where massively scalable IT capabilities would get delivered as a service. The important advantage for enterprise-level customers is that would have the ability to scale up and down, depending upon the amount of computing resources they might need.

The pay-as-you-go model embraced by Amazon and a host of others is one approach. Another is the platform as a service model embodied by the likes of Force.com from Salesforce and AppEngine from Google. And, of course, there are the myriad end user apps which reside in the cloud used by hundreds of millions of people each day.

"What is cloud computing? " said Tien Tzuo, the CEO of Zuora, a start up which specializes in subscriptions as a service. "Anything where you don't need to own your own physical infrastructure--simply write your code and deploy it on someone else's servers."

Tzuo points to a confluence of factors which have helped usher in the change. Bandwidth is finally everywhere, the security and privacy issues around storing data online don't raise as many hackles among individuals and companies (though they still linger), and the widespread adoption of technologies like open source means that inexpensive hosted software components are now ubiquitous.

You see what that means in the field every day. A company no longer needs to buy software--or a big data center, for that matter. Instead, it can launch applications by choosing among different types of Internet infrastructure, such as AppEngine or Salesforce.

That's a big deal in an economic downturn, when a lot of start-ups in business simply are too strapped for funding to divert money to buy and staff their own computing infrastructure.

So how did we arrive here?
Like most technology transitions, this was a gradual evolution with antecedents in attempts to move beyond EDI toward a world of Internet scale distributed computing with Web services. Much of the 1990s was dominated by esoteric debates over alphabet soup-style technical standards to help further this along. Then computer scientists Ian Foster, Steven Tuecke and Carl Kesselman authored a paper on how to extend the clustering concept. (Clustering was a popular IT technique that allowed a system to automatically decide which CPU should run a particular piece of code.) In practice, their road map for the grid was akin to a metered utility service where a company plugs into the electricity grid and pays only for what it uses.

But before moving off the drawing board, lingering infrastructure issues still needed to get resolved. Paul Wallis, the CTO of Stroma Software, has a very good analysis summing this up:

One of the hurdles that had to be jumped with the move from clustering to grid was data residency. Because of the distributed nature of the Grid the computational nodes could be situated anywhere in the world. It was fine having all that CPU power available, but the data on which the CPU performed its operations could be thousands of miles away, causing a delay (latency) between data fetch and execution. CPUs need to be fed and watered with different volumes of data depending on the tasks they are processing. Running a data intensive process with disparate data sources can create a bottleneck in the I/O, causing the CPU to run inefficiently, and affecting economic viability.

Storage management, security provisioning and data movement became the nuts to be cracked in order for grid to succeed. A toolkit, called Globus, was created to solve these issues, but the infrastructure hardware available still has not progressed to a level where true grid computing can be wholly achieved.

By the early part of this decade, some of those infrastructure issues began to get resolved with the emergence of huge data center services. Cloud implementations adopted by Amazon and others featured the grid idea's payer-per-use concept. It also proved a boon to small developers who now did not need to own their own physical infrastructures. They simply could write their code and then deploy it on someone else's servers

Of course, nothing in computing moves in a smooth progression from A to Z. And with the emergence of cloud computing have come calls to standardize both the APIs as well as the platform services which underlie those services. Otherwise, some caution, you run the risk of cloud computing vendor lock-in. Microsoft's Dare Obasanjo put it bluntly in a post on the topic last fall:

The APIs provided by Amazon's cloud computing platform (EC2/S3/EBS/etc) are radically different from those provided by Google App Engine (Datastore API/Python runtime/Images API/etc). For zero lock-in to occur in this space, there need to be multiple providers of the same underlying APIs. Otherwise, migrating between cloud computing platforms will be more like switching your application from Ruby on Rails and MySQL to Django and PostgreSQL (i.e. a complete rewrite).

If history is a guidepost, most of these petty disputes will get smoothed over in time. Not so much because the vendors will feel compelled to do the right thing but because customers will force them to act in their enlightened self interest. The more difficult question to consider is how long it will take before businesses regularly tap cloud services to make money. That's when you'll know it's become part of the computing mainstream.

See also:
• Salesforce.com: Pondering the next 10 years
• The three routes to cloud computing's future

OpSource is hosting a very timely conference in San Francisco this week on software-as-a-service. What with the meltdown in the economy and continuing concern about the cost and environmental impact of energy use, there's interest in how cloud computing will impact the IT world.

And what better way to cut through the hype over the so-called green aspects of SaaS than to assemble veteran technologists who might share their experiences with the uninitiated? That's the usual format: People ready to impart knowledge to people eager to receive knowledge.

(Credit: CNET News)

Good idea but, well, maybe another day.

As I sat in a cavernous ballroom in San Francisco's Westin St. Francis Hotel scribbling down notes, it dawned on me that I was one of, literally, a handful of people listening to the lecturer. At most, there were 10 or 15 of us--a pity because as he faced a sea of mostly empty seats, Randy Bias, a technology strategist for GoGrid, a supplier of cloud computing infrastructure, offered up a convincing brief on the energy-saving advantages of virtualization and why it makes sense to offload server functions to the cloud.

He was followed on stage by Adrian Bowles, a director at Datamonitor, who was equally eloquent about why there are compelling business reasons to rip up the procedures of hardware provisioning that IT followed until the recession (some call it a depression) hit. "The old days of 'buy it, plug it in, and run it' are probably gone forever," Bowles said, proceeding to lay out a hard-headed case on behalf of going green.

By then, I counted eight people--eight--in the ballroom (not including the speaker). Most of the folks attending this two-day kaffeeklatsch couldn't be bothered with a topic that obviously bored them silly. No matter that green tech at its most basic is technology done with a low environmental impact. For some reason, a discussion of low-energy technologies, virtualization, and improved cooling techniques weren't enough to hook them.

As they used to say back in my Brooklyn neighborhood, whaddya gonna do? But truth be told, I was puzzled by all the no-shows. It wasn't as if the other sessions being held at the same time--"SaaS marketing in a downturn" and "Architecting and delivery for SaaS success"--were so much more thrilling.

Could it be that "green" remains too squishy a concept for most of these red-blooded show-me-the-money types? I buttonholed one attendee in a hallway, who agreed as he was munching down a free ice cream provided by the show's sponsors. But the proverbial man on the street interview doesn't suffice.

I heard it said at one of the sessions how IT compensation plans now hinge on how successful you are doing projects faster and doing them more inexpensively. That's why SaaS advocates believe their timing couldn't be any better. Maybe that's misplaced optimism; we'll see as the year progresses.

But this much is clear: telling the boss that you're saving the environment in the process is not likely to be the clincher. Ever.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--George Zachary, a partner with Charles River Ventures, offered an apercu that may wind up getting quoted quite a lot over the coming year. Cloud computing, he said, "is the new dot-com."

I have the feeling that he's right. I spent Friday afternoon listening to executives representing several of the top companies in their respective spheres, singing hosannas to the power of the cloud. This was a serious gathering of technologists, and their enthusiasm for cloud computing's potential hearkened back to an earlier time.

The future's not cloudy: It's all about "the cloud"

(Credit: Charles Cooper/CNET)

In fact, after the tech industry began rebuilding following the dot-com bust in the early part of the decade, many of these folks were similarly waxing enthusiastic about a new generation of Web-based consumer applications. So it was that they approached the growth of Web-based infrastructure to host storage and applications as a promising harbinger.

"It's the biggest shift we've had in computing in two decades," said Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff.

Benioff, who made his comments at a roundtable discussion on cloud computing organized by TechCrunch, also offered up an anecdote to underscore the speed with which peoples' computing habits are changing.

After closing the company's fiscal quarter, Benioff was scheduled to fly off to Davos, Switzerland, to attend the World Economic Forum. He was supposed to schlep along his laptop for the trip, but ultimately opted to leave his personal computer at home. Instead, he relied on his BlackBerry smart phone, which accessed all of Benioff's applications over the conferences Wi-Fi service.

"Everything ran in the cloud," he said.

Vic Gundrota, the vice president of engineering at Google, said the shift had essentially retired the importance of platform lockup, a debate which he said mattered more than a decade ago. Nowadays, he said, regardless of the platform, "through magic of the Web, we've built a platform that's available through the browser."

But there's still a lot to be settled, not the least being the challenge of how to bring to enterprise computing more of the user-friendly software interfaces that people have become accustomed to in the personal computing realm.

"We need to have protocols that are open and accessible for anyone to use," said Werner Vogels, the chief technology officer at Amazon. He added that "in many ways, we are still at Day 1."

Paul Buchheit, the founder of Friendfreed, echoed that sentiment. ""We talk a lot about back-end infrastructure, but if you look at this from a user perspective, it's about how all this will interoperate," he noted. "There has to be a user experience that makes it simple."

How long this shift is likely to take to complete was a subject that got batted around without conclusion. Interestingly, Lew Tucker, the CTO at Sun Microsystems, suggested that "start-ups are already there" but that enterprises were relatively lagging behind.

Some, like Benioff, noted the irony of holding a roundtable discussion about cloud computing on Microsoft's premises. That was not lost on the participants. Before the meeting, one of them said privately, "They realize that the world's changed. They're smart but they also know they need to evolve with the times."

A big outage at Google Tuesday. Things go dark early while most of the U.S. is sleeping. Still, the Internet is without borders and so the glitch leaves millions of people who use Google Web mail and Google Apps, high and dry.

It was mild melodrama for a few hours but things returned to normal after a few hours. It's still unclear what happened, though Google says it's investigating the problem.

Truth be told, the walls of Jericho did not crumble, though the outage nonetheless triggered the (now thoroughly predictable) hand-wringing and bloviating from the usual cast of characters. Amusing to watch, but after this incident, there's also the wider context to consider.

Any outages are embarrassing. But while Gmail did crash a few times in 2008, this is the first time the service has gone down in quite a while. (As my colleague Stephen Shankland noted, Google extends a guarantee to corporate customers paying for any of its business Apps services, which rely on the cloud. The promise: they will be able to access Gmail at least 99.9 percent of the time every month. If not, Google pays them a penalty fee. So far Google says it hasn't fallen below that mark.)

If these sorts of outages occurred with more regularity, I suppose that would seriously retard cloud computing's growth. Google and Salesforce.com and Amazon and any other purveyors of cloud-based services obviously cringe when their connections fail. Not to underplay the anguish customers and vendors find themselves dealing with, but the real news here is how rare these cloud-computing outages have become.

A few years ago it seemed that eBay's Web site was seizing up all of the time. The reality was less severe but merchants and bidders would scream bloody murder. At the same time, eBay, Yahoo, Amazon, and Buy.com were dealing with repeated denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. Things got so bad that some even feared for the future of e-commerce.

We now know how the story turned out. Fact is that there are no 100 percent guarantees anymore, not in a world in which applications increasingly get hosted on the Internet. When things go bump in the night, as they inevitably will, there is going to be a commotion, albeit a temporary one. Get over it, already.

This is computing, after all.

About two years ago, Jeff Bezos used the occasion of his appearance at the Web 2.0 Summit to talk up the merits of EC2 and S3, Amazon's entries into the then-nascent area of cloud computing.

The predictably perky CEO was enthusiastically regaling a standing-room-only ballroom about a future in which his company would sell data storage infrastructure and server capacity by subscription: the idea being that customers of the new services could move quickly from idea conception to a successful product by farming out the infrastructure side for Web scale computing to Amazon.

Now, that's hardware!

(Credit: John Deere)

"We make muck so you don't have to," Bezos joked.

It was an interesting idea but a left turn for Amazon. I remember that the guys sitting next to me weren't equally impressed by the pitch. They joked among themselves that Amazon was a company that sold books. Who was Bezos kidding?

Well, we know how that story turned out. Bezos' timing was propitious. Amazon happened to go into Web-based services around the same time that customers had started to lose their fear of "the cloud." Not everyone, mind you. But increasing numbers of start-ups and small companies were receptive to the idea that they could increase their server and storage capacity on a subscription basis. With millions of people going online to store data, run applications, or communicate via Webmail services--and all that functionality stored on the cloud--now they could participate in that computing shift without breaking their budgets.

This all was proceeding apace. But it was a slow transition. Then came last fall's financial meltdown, and suddenly, cloud computing's proponents had a timely marketing message. On the "Charlie Rose" show Thursday night, tech pioneer-turned-prescient-doomsayer Mark Andreessen, took note of the impact this computing shift has had on the tech business.

"So you've got a whole generation of start-ups that are basically just a couple of programmers with a couple of laptops, and they upload everything into the Amazon cloud. It's pay-by-the-drink like utility. So all of a sudden, you have this whole new wave of Internet start-ups getting started for practically no money, right? So there is a level of innovation. Every kid coming out of Harvard, every kid coming out of school now thinks he can be the next Mark Zuckerberg, and with these new technologies like cloud computing, he actually has a shot."

That's the classic sales pitch on behalf of cloud computing but Andreessen basically has it right. What's new is that with the economy going through a rough patch, this is turning out to be one of the few bright spots in an otherwise gloomy tech landscape. IDC predicts that cloud computing will account for about 30 percent of new growth in the Internet over the next three years. Poor economy or not. "It's not a surprise," said Frank Gens, the firm's research chief, who contends that the financial crisis only magnifies the benefits of the economics behind this computing model.

But here's the rub: While many executives responsible for their companies' IT operations grok the vision, they still refuse to make the switch. More than 60 percent of the companies surveyed recently by Kelton Research reported they did not use cloud-computing technologies, and most of them have no plans to use them anytime soon.

Chalk up their lingering resistance to a couple of old bugaboos which have been around since the days when "MIS directors," pressed to decentralize their computer operations, ruled the tech roost: security and fear of loss of control. If past is prologue, those issues will get sorted out over time--the same way that the sundry issues surrounding client-server and Internet-based computing models ultimately got resolved.

Capacity on demand is a big deal, especially for start-ups that are in no position to be buying servers. With API deployment, you say "launch" on these virtual servers and you're off to the races. It's just a lot more convenient to have an Internet-based data center.

Not long ago, Sun Microsystems' Dave Douglas told me that "every one" of his conversations with customers ultimately comes around to a discussion of where the cloud is heading. That pretty much jibes with what I've heard from executives at other hardware and software companies. Pay attention to this trend because it's taking place in real time, away from the media's glare. In an age where Twitter, Facebook, and a laundry list of forgettable social network doo-dads have dominated our attention, all of a sudden, infrastructure has become cool again.

Who woulda thunk it?