The Ideal, Non-Proprietary Cloud

jg21 writes "As previously discussed on Slashdot, the new tendency to speak of 'The Cloud' or 'Cloud Computing' often seems to generate more heat than light, but one familiar industry fault line is becoming clear — those who believe clouds can be proprietary vs. those who believe they should be free. One CEO who sides with open clouds in order that companies can pick and choose from vendors depending on precisely what they need has written a detailed article in which he outlines how, in his opinion, Platform-as-a-Service should work. He identifies nine features of 'an ideal PaaS cloud' including the requirement that 'Developers should be able to interact with the cloud computer, to do business with it, without having to get on the phone with a sales person, or submit a help ticket.' [From the article: 'I think this means that cloud computing companies will, just like banks, begin more and more to "loan" each other infrastructure to handle our own peaks and valleys, But in order for this to happen we'd need the next requirement.']"

Comments

Re:renting software ..

[larry bagina]

hiring rackspace is relying on third party technology.

Also - bandwidth for the upload of the jewels

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

And in this day and age, when even medium-sized businesses can be sitting on literally terabytes of data, how are you going to upload all of that data to "The Cloud" so that "The Cloud" can analyze it for you?

Maintaining a constant 10Mbps WAN connection to "The Cloud" would be monstrously expensive, and yet, at 10Mbps = (10 / 8)MBps = 1.25MBps, that means you would need
.

1 terabyte / 1.25MBps
= (1000 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000 bytes) / (1.25 * 1000 * 1000 bytes per second)
= [(1000 * 1000) / 1.25] seconds
= 800,000 seconds
= [800,000 / (60 * 60 * 24)] days
= 9.259 days

just to upload a terabyte of data at WAN speeds of 10Mbps.

So "The Cloud" isn't going to have realtime interactions with your corporate database - "The Cloud" is going to BE your corporate database.