SAN FRANCISCO--During a panel discussion at the Structure conference here Wednesday, various representatives from the cloud-computing world offered their views. Panelists included:
- Christophe Bisciglia, senior software engineer, Google
- Jason Hoffman, founder and chief technology officer, Joyent
- Tony Lucas, CEO, XCalibre Communications
- Lew Moorman, senior vice president of strategy and corporate development, Rackspace
- Geva Perry, chief marketing officer, GigaSpaces
- Joe Weinman, VP of Strategic Solutions at AT&T
The panelists agreed that there will be open and proprietary, as well as specialized, cloud platforms. The discussion got a little heated between Google's Bisciglia and Joyent's Hoffman on the subject of open platforms and Google's BigTable software for distributed data storage.
"The question is, is it about selling your soul? You can't leave," Hoffman said during the panel, referring to Google's App Engine and cloud-computing platform. "There's been a lot published on what an open, loving cloud should do. We should give people real assurances that the cloud is a good place to be."
During the panel, Bisciglia said people can build a better mouse trap and compete with what Google offers. "When we publish something on BigTable, it is not to say that it is a lock-in, but it's our attempt to say that this is something that worked for us," he said.
"If your data is in Google's BigTable, you can't pull it out. You can't install it on your own hardware or leave. You have big brother telling you everything will be OK," Hoffman told me after the panel concluded. "One solution is that Google should provide nice export tools, but that doesn't solve the problem of where you run it. If I were a big enterprise company, I might want to run BigTable on my own hardware. If Oracle had the equivalent of a Google App Engine, a customer could run it on their own or someone else's hardware. What if Facebook started on Google App Engine? They would be stuck on Google."
Joyent is a David facing at least one Goliath, and its livelihood depends on an open-infrastructure approach. It doesn't have the market power to create its own standards. The company is doing 5 billion page views on month, which includes about 25 percent of third-party Facebook application pages, according to CEO David Young.
Joyent is working on a cloud-computing standards initiative called Cloud 9.
"We want to make it easy for people to leave," Hoffman said, adding that application programming interfaces should not hard-code server provider names into APIs.
"We need to interoperate just like the electrical grid," Young said. Google's BigTable and Amazon's SimpleDB are not pushing standards, which are needed to move things forward."
Click here to see more of CNET's stories from the Structure 08 conference and on cloud computing generally.Ask a dozen people what "cloud computing" means and you'll get a dozen different answers, all pointing to the network. Rob Boothby of Joyent interviewed more than a dozen technology wonks, including Steve Gillmor, Matt Mullenweg, Tim O'Reilly, Kevin Marks, Rafe Needleman, Stowe Boyd, Brian Solis and myself, at the Web 2.0 Expo, to answer the question, "What is Cloud Computing ?"
Check out the responses in this video:
Google's announcement of its App Engine has naturally generated a lot of buzz, as well as some fear, uncertainty, and doubt. There is the concern that Google will corral even more user data via its App Engine, becoming a kind of 21st century data and advertising baron, as Microsoft has been the operating system and productivity software baron in the last three decades.
If you extrapolate from Google's growing share of search and advertising, and include a growing share of Web applications through its APIs and the fledgling App Engine, you could imagine a Google that becomes the dominant Internet operating system and infrastructure provider. It's still the early days of cloud computing, but the ground is shifting.
"It's funny that we waged the war to free ourselves of (the) shackles of Microsoft and Hailstorm (a failed attempt to manage personal data)," said David Young, CEO of cloud infrastructure provider and App Engine competitor Joyent. "Now, for some reason, the digerati are anxious to run into exact same thing with Google. It's not evil, but they are tracking users and clickstreams, which (are) the real currency of the Web, and most people don't care. If you can get all data, you can target ads and the user experience, such as showing a site in a different color, depending on user profile."
The Web currency of user data and clickstreams is also vital to Joyent's business. The company has 10,000 customers, handles 5 billion page views a month, and provides infrastructure for 25 percent of the third-party applications running on Facebook. Through its Player's Club, Joyent provides free hosting to Facebook developers, as well as OpenSocial developers, in exchange for the data.
"We gather the data and work with ad networks to help their clients target sites," Young said. Joyent works with ad networks such as Slide, RockYou, Social Media, Federated Media, and AdBrite. "With billions of visitors, Google can gather the data on its own, but the social networks allow companies like Joyent to get access to it as well," he said. Basically, the majority of developers are willing to share their user data in exchange for free infrastructure services.
David Young, CEO, Joyent
(Credit: Joyent)"If I were Google, I would buy every big Web application, such as Six Apart and WordPress, out there to get access to clickstream and user data as people move across the Web. I think that is what App Engine is all about," Young said.
In light of App Engine, Joyent is offering a similar infrastructure service (but using MySQL, Postgre SQL, or Oracle databases rather than Google's Bigtable and file system). Like App Engine, the Joyent "Garden of Eden" program includes free infrastructure for Python Web applications in exchange for customer information and clickstream data.
However, Joyent isn't limiting the usage, and it will provide unlimited compute, storage, memory, and bandwidth, as well as root control. Google's App Engine, which is in beta, is limited to 500MB of storage, 200 million megacycles of CPU, and 10GB of bandwidth per day. Young figures that this would support 25,000 unique users a month, while Joyent will support a million users for free.
With all the hand-wringing about Google's increasing footprint and clout, the company is contributing code to the open-source world and driving data portability standards, such as the OpenSocial and Social Graph APIs. David Recordon notes the potential for App Engine sites to log in via Google Accounts.
Today that means that every App Engine site could have a shared sense of a user; the ability to understand who someone is across different App Engine sites and Google services. (Obviously I'd love to see Google move toward supporting OpenID for this sort of thing, but small bits piece by piece work for me.)
Imagine if Google Accounts added support for the (upcoming) OpenSocial REST APIs. All of a sudden, each of these App Engine sites could start injecting activity and querying for activity across each other. Maybe you'll argue that this just means that Google Accounts could become the next big social network, but isn't it a bit different when this functionality is just a part of your hosting infrastructure? What if Google Accounts ignored the notion of friends and instead left that to actual social networks? If done right, this really could be the first shipping glimpse of the distributed social Web that there is to come.
If Google's growth trends continue to accelerate, the company will colonize more Web territory, collecting more data and monetizing it across billions of users and sites. So far, Google has a head start, with its highly profitable search and ad business (which is why Microsoft is in hot pursuit of Yahoo) and is moving into new application territory.
The old guard--Microsoft, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Sun Microsystems, Cisco Systems, Oracle--haven't yet revealed plans for colonizing Web users with end-to-end, cloud-based platforms. They have stood by while Salesforce.com becomes a company with $1 billion in annual revenue. Will they be standing on the sidelines as Google and others, such as the 22-person Joyent, prove the viability of cloud platforms as a service?
On the road to the elusive Web 3.0 (something to do with semantics, meaning, and context rather than just data, links, and AJAX), core infrastructure is beginning to move from the edge to a center inhabited by companies such as Amazon, Salesforce.com, Joyent, and now Google with its new App Engine.
Call it Web 2.5, where the platform-as-a-service providers allow developers to create Web applications via the cloud and for users to consume them on any Web-connected device, anytime and anywhere. It eliminates what Amazon's Jeff Bezos describes as the "muck," the undifferentiated heavy lifting, such as setting up and maintaining servers, databases, storage, and networks.
It also leverages data centers from large players like Amazon and Google that were built from the ground up to support Web applications at huge, virtualized scale and with high reliability and relatively low cost. And, it creates potentially giant subscription-based revenue streams for the platform-as-a-service providers. They become utilities providing Web services to the planet and managing the high-value personal profile data.
Google App Engine, which was unveiled tonight at Google's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, offers similar capabilities to Amazon's EC2, S3, and SimpleDB services. Google App Engine is limited to using the Python language, Google APIs, and a relatively modest amount of storage, compute cycles, and bandwidth per day currently, but you can see where this is heading.
Google could parlay its search and advertising technology, market dominance, and its infrastructure prowess into a powerful engine that runs and monetizes thousands or millions of externally developed applications.
Salesforce.com provides a more mature example today with its Force.com platform. It allows developers to write applications, mostly CRM-oriented, in a variety of languages that can run natively on the Salesforce.com software platform and data centers.
(Credit:
salesforce.com)
In many ways it is the Microsoft model--you need a subscription (license in the old days) to the platform to run your application. In this case, "run" means that Salesforce.com provides developers all the software and hardware services in exchange for a fee, which is based on specific metrics, such as Web services calls.
Rival NetSuite, as well as smaller outfits such as Bungee Labs, are seizing on the concept of providing complete cloud-based development and deployment platform services.
Microsoft hasn't yet shown its cards in the platform-as-a-service arena. Nor has the object of its affection, Yahoo. Microsoft has talked about SQL Server Data Services and the grand synchronization mesh, but it hasn't revealed any plans for an end-to-end hosted platform-as-a-service for developing and serving applications from the cloud. Mary Jo Foley has some insight on that topic.
Web 3.0 as envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee is not around the corner, but it is busily percolating. In parallel, platform-as-a-service is evolving, the plateau of Web 2.5. When the two meet, Web 3.0 will have arrived.
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