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

Speaking of non-proprietary clouds...

[Anonymous Coward]

The guys at Red Hat have released the first version of a project called Genome genome.et.redhat.com . This looks to be an open source project that makes Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and CentOS clouds using Xen, KVM, and commodity hardware.

Re:"Proprietary"?

[Chandon Seldon]

The word "proprietary" is a very vague term [...] The bottom line is that wherever there is value, someone will find a way to charge for it.

Proprietary implies lock-in and monopoly. The opposite is an "open standard" where there can be a competitive market.

Think proprietary = monopoly, open = free market.