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

Security?

[llamalad]

Am I missing something, or does the article make no mention of security?

Re:Security?

[thatskinnyguy]

Am I missing something, or does the article make no mention of security?

Or some sort of business model where someone makes money to run all of this.

Re:Security?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Or indeed, mention of anyone, anywhere actually using "cloud computing".

Re:Security?

[Electrum]

Or indeed, mention of anyone, anywhere actually using "cloud computing".

Yeah, no one is actually using Amazon's EC2.

Re:Security?

[Jick]

There are already great examples of businesses using the cloud to support their infrastructure (Amazon's posterchild being SmugMug.)

One of the major reasons people will migrate is efficiency. In this green-age that we're now in, companies are looking to reduce their individual power requirements while increasing scale. Who can provide cheaper power or more efficient cooling for datacenter? Your on-site NOC or ACME colo? ACME colo, or sunpowered-ocean-cooled-datacenter.com? By making this leap, companies are able to lower their costs, 'at the cost' (har har) of building their applications in a cloud-friendly manner.

There are a few major hurdles left to cross for widespread adoption, but you can see this wave coming from miles away.

Two of those hurdles are reliability and performance. As a business looking to lower costs by switching to cloud-based computing (say Amazon's EC2), I need to know what kind of performance I can get and how reliable the service will be. This information is starting to come out via services like CloudStatus.com -- which is able to give performance and health metrics on a real-time & historical basis.

You'll definitely see a huge push towards SLAs which will push adoption. The competition is heating up in this space.

// Disclaimer -- I work for Hyperic which wrote CloudStatus

So does this mean.....

[mike_c999]

... That cloud computing silver lining has started to tarnish already?

Huh?

[sarathmenon]

What makes him so sure that interoperability will be even on the provider's list? I don't see any easy way to use EC2 with some third party solution for storage. Plus, it would be lame if I had to go via internet for every request that should ideally be local.

Re:Huh?

[bsDaemon]

No, you just don't get how awesome it'll be to get all your Web 2.5rc1 content via Internet2 through the cloud, man... it'll totally shift your paradigm.

Never so apropos

[$RANDOMLUSER]

I've looked at clouds from both sides now,
From up and down, and still somehow,
It's cloud illusions I recall,
I really don't know clouds, at all.

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.

renting software ..

[rs232]

Relying on third party technology is never going to provide the reliability or uptime required. The more straight forward solution is to hire some rackspace and host your own solution. 'Cloud Computing' is just the latest marketing promotion designed to move us to renting software.

Re:renting software ..

[larry bagina]

hiring rackspace is relying on third party technology.

Re:renting software ..

[dkf]

'Cloud Computing' is just the latest marketing promotion designed to move us to renting software.

For some software that makes sense. Some apps cost an enormous amount to buy a copy of (no, MS Office isn't one of these!) and many smaller businesses don't need a copy continually. For example, a small engineering firm probably doesn't need a Computational Fluid Dynamics package the whole time, but when they're designing a product it's useful to rent some use of one.

Does this mean that everyone will be hiring everything? I really doubt it. I reckon that the end result will be a mixed economy with some purchases and some hiring. Which will be the dominant mode at any time? Well, that'll probably change from year to year. Guess what? That's true for other parts of the economy too. IT's not that special...

Re:renting software ..

[samkass]

You're making a lot of assumptions about needs, uptime, costs, and levels of in-house expertise when you make those blanket statements. There's always a balance between "relying on third parties" and "not invented here syndrome". In the latter case, you'll have people attempting things way outside their area of expertise and reliability or uptime will be significantly worse than if they'd let the experts do their job and paid a fair price.

Re:renting software ..

[querist]

I believe that you are partly correct in your assertion that cloud computing is, eseentially, marketing hype intended to move us toward renting software.

One advantage that cloud computing has over your proposed solution is that you are not paying for the idle time where your rack of computers is not doing anything. You only pay for what you use (within limits - I suspect a cellphone-like billing plan will emerge). This and the rapid scalability would be wonderful for smaller businesses.

Imagine that you have minimal needs during most of the year - word processing, billing, etc, but on a quarterly basis you need to do your taxes (US businesses normally must file tax reports on a quarterly basis) and on an annual basis you need to do a large amount of computing - employee tax records, inventory, other annual processing. With cloud computing, if you are willing to accept having your data somewhere else that is not in your physical control, you simply ramp-up the computing need in December and then you're done. You finish on time and have a larger "bill" at the end of the month. This is very much like electricity - in cooler months you don't run your AC in the house, but when a heat wave comes along you run the AC more and you just pay a higher bill. You don't maintain your own power generation capacity, you simply use more of the available supply when you need it.

One of the nice ideas behind "cloud" computing is that computational is treated as a consumable resource, much like electricity. Cloud computing, in that way at least, is similar to "grid computing". The differences are important, however.

"Grid" computing is related to raw computing power being distributed for a large problem. Cloud computing, on the other hand, is not so much about one user being able to access huge amounts of processing power at once as it is about making computing resources available on demand and from anywhere.

Imagine it like this for a moment: every device that plugs into a wall outlet has its own "power meter" like the one that the electric company use to determine how much to bill you each month. (Let's not go into a discussion about estimates, how often they really read the meters, etc., please. This is only an analogy.) You can take your devices anywhere, and when you plug it into the wall the little meter records how much electricity you use.

So, when you are at a hotel, a friend's house, or the public library, you are still being billed personally for the electricity that your laptop computer is using. You can do what you like with the electricity as long as you don't violate any laws of physics and as long as you stay within the limits of your connection or access. (In other words, don't try to draw 40 amps from a 20 amp outlet - you'll trip the breaker.)

But, instead of electricity, you are accessing computational services in the form of data storage and software as well as data transfer. The nice thing is that you can access it from anywhere (such as Google Apps) with little dependence on operating system or platform.

If (and this is a big "if") they can work out the security concerns, this could be very useful for large businesses.

Re:renting software ..

[sm62704]

For example, a small engineering firm probably doesn't need a Computational Fluid Dynamics package the whole time, but when they're designing a product it's useful to rent some use of one.

Except that the training required to learn this software is more expensive than the software. It would be cheaper to hire an engineer who had his own tools.

It's like when your car breaks - it's cheaper to hire a mechanic than to rent diagnostic computers and other tools the mechanic has and learn about internal combustion engines and how to use the tools you rented.

Remember, the term "cloud computing" was coined by the clueless who didn't understand the chart's meaning, or he would have simply said "distributed computing".

Re:renting software ..

[Timothy Brownawell]

Relying on third party technology is never going to provide the reliability or uptime required.

Even if the third party has way more experience and better hardware than you do?

Re:renting software ..

[Z34107]

"Cloud computing" sounds exactly like how (I'd imagine, beinga young'un) mainframe time was rented back in the Bad Old Days. Except that one mainframe has been replaced with one "cloud."

However they billed for a batch job back in the '50s is how I'd expect them to build for their cloud. Just replace dumb terminals or an operator with the interwebs, and you're good to go.

Re:renting software ..

[random name 6721]

Imagine it like this for a moment: every device that plugs into a wall outlet has its own "power meter" like the one that the electric company use to determine how much to bill you each month...

Well, true, Cloud computing could provide that. But you are missing the point of the name 'Grid Computing' - the original idea was to model compute time provisioning after a Power *Grids*: you plug your laptop into an outlet, and, voila, ...

So, your wall outlet idea was already promised by Grid Computing -- what Cloud computing seems to add, IMHO, is support for (a) very simple interfaces to use the provided resources, and (b) support for specific usage modes. Grids are more all-purpose infrastructure, which makes them rather complex, and non-trivial to use. Clouds focus on a few, but very common use cases, which makes them much more simple to use. IMHO, the infrastructure to implement a Cloud can very well be a Grid...

Best, Andre.

Re:renting software ..

[dkf]

Except that the training required to learn this software is more expensive than the software. It would be cheaper to hire an engineer who had his own tools.

Not really. The top-end CFD codes are really very expensive indeed, and have "interesting" restrictions on use too. (I know of at least one that is considered to be a munition, being greatly useful for designing missile systems.)

It's like when your car breaks - it's cheaper to hire a mechanic than to rent diagnostic computers and other tools the mechanic has and learn about internal combustion engines and how to use the tools you rented.

Except that the focus is on renting to businesses, not consumers. While cloud computing can be made to work with consumers, you typically won't sell it to them "raw", but rather as packaged services that might be paid for directly or through advertising. This whole area of cloud-driven business models is very complex indeed.

Remember, the term "cloud computing" was coined by the clueless who didn't understand the chart's meaning, or he would have simply said "distributed computing".

I should warn you, I work in this field. Cloud computing is more about the space where SOA and grid computing meet, while distributed computing tends to be more about building clusters and stuff like that. The issue is that once you go over the size of a cluster, the overheads of messaging go up massively as you start having to take into account things like security and management (i.e. asshats of all varieties). This means as you move up to the cloud level of conceptual operation you've got to think in terms of breaking your overall processing in different ways. For example, if you were doing drug discovery, you might use a large high-availability cluster (possibly based off a SETI@home-like cycle scavenger) to do the initial search for candidates, and then you'd refine the matches with supercomputing time (using finer and more complex models of molecular interactions) where you know you're not just throwing effort away on a "no hope" option. And that is actually a simple example of what is going to be the case; science and engineering workflows can easily get much more complex, especially when working with multiple datasets with elaborate security requirements (common in medical research). And it's when you consider the effects of this on the way that software vendors work that the whole renting stuff drops out as a way of (probably) increasing the size of market for those guys.

In short, your cynicism is both understandable and laudable, but misplaced.

"Proprietary"?

[samkass]

The word "proprietary" is a very vague term that's usually used to connote some sort of "them", where the "us" are the good guys.

The bottom line is that wherever there is value, someone will find a way to charge for it. If this "cloud computing" really has no model under which anyone finds it valuable enough to commercialize it, then it's probably not going to be very popular anyway.

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.

just like fiat monetary systems?

[conspirator57]

so we'll end up with a sub-prime computing crisis?

how can you bail out companies that fail to keep sufficient computing reserves in hand to cover their potential obligations?

Re:just like fiat monetary systems?

[Anonymous Coward]

how can you bail out companies that fail to keep sufficient computing reserves in hand to cover their potential obligations?

Simple: The computing provider uses a standard contract that doesn't offer any particular service level guarantee or compensation for downtime and call it 'industry standard'.

Then if they don't have enough reserves to cover their obligations they laugh in their customers' faces.

Blogosphere weather

[sm62704]

Today's forecaset: cloudy. This afternoon, continued cloudy with occasional periods of distributed computing.

Tonight: Dark, with periods of light toward morning.

Tomorrow: Ignorant, with occasional words coined by the ignorant used by the knowledgable. May be occasional clouds in the afternoon. In case of tornado, stay in your basement.

Upload the crown jewels of your enterprise

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

In this day and age - when hardware is essentially worthless [today, for under $200, you can get what would have been a $10 million supercomputer ten years ago], and when even RDBs are essentially worthless [MySQL & PostgreSQL being free downloads], the only things which add value are:
.

1) Your schema [or your customizations of the vendor's standard template of the schema for your industry], and

2) Your business logic for manipulating the schema [or your customizations of the vendor's standard template of the business logic for your industry], and

3) The actual data in your database, and

4) Your algorithms for analyzing the data in your database [or your customizations of the vendor's standard template of the analysis algorithms for your industry].

Of those, at least 1), 3), and 4) are going to have to be uploaded to "The Cloud" [and 2) might have to at least interact with "The Cloud"], and unless "The Cloud" encrypts everything - both data & logic [and how do you really "encrypt" something if ultimately the registers in the CPU have to see unencrypted data, and especially unencrypted logic & algorithms?] - then you've just uploaded the crown jewels of your entire enterprise for all the world to see.

2008 -- Year of the Cloud

[istartedi]

Every buzzword soaked trade publication on the planet has Cloud on the cover now. When looking for a job, I'm going to put my name and contact info on my resume. Then, in place of the usual job history and qualifications I will put, in the largest font that fits, one word: CLOUD. My pay will go up 25%. Then, in 6 months, people will be saying "remember cloud computing?".

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.

buzzword

[owlnation]

Ok, I hate buzzwords as much as the next person not wearing a pale blue shirt...

But I'd like to suggest "cloudware" as a potential interchangeable word for "vapourware".

For obvious reasons...

Re: economies of scale ..

[rs232]

"You can't get the same scaling from a physical server as you can get from "the cloud" for anywhere near the same price"

Most people don't need such scaling and I can get more per price from a box hosted in a server farm. The reason "the cloud" would be cheaper is they build and staff it at the lowest possible cost. Things happen like forgetting to test the emergency generators, or what probably really happened, skimping on routine maintenence.

Re:Reality?

[clang_jangle]

When discussing vaporware, it seems to me that any matters beyond that point are superfluous.

Are you mad?! Vaporware MUST be kept free, or we're all doomed!
Seriously though, yes, "the cloud" paradigm is a myth, but it's a myth much beloved by certain software companies who hope to restore the "balance" of scarcity in the future. So if we actually do get "the cloud", it will almost certainly be proprietary, as that's really the whole point. Of course we probably won't get it, as other than reintroducing scarcity, it serves no realistic purpose. At this time, we don't even have a proper definition for "cloud computing", other than "essential software will no longer be local". How transparent is that?

That's exactly what the NY Times is doing.

[Stu Charlton]

The NY Times converted 4 terabytes / 11 million TIFF based images & articles from their archives in 24 hours using 100 EC2 instances. And continue to do it to this day. Cost? A couple hundred dollars.