Red Hat Bets Big On Cloud Target

eldavojohn writes "Red Hat's CEO prophetically saith 'The clouds will all run Linux' in a brief interview before the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo. Here's the skinny: Red Hat management tools take a back seat to grid computing goals, high switching costs are the trick to surviving slow periods, Microsoft's interoperability tools are vaporware, they're striving to catch up to VMWare, Ubuntu is not the competition, JBoss is growing twice as fast as RHEL and Amazon pays the fee while Google wears its own Red Hat for free."

Comments

Where's the money?

[dlgeek]

If you RTFA, Red Hat is planning on getting it's revenue from selling support. I'm not sure I see this happening. If you're running a cloud service, you're going to have a LOT of machines and you're going to need enough custom support and custom software that you're probably going to have in-house support. If you have in-house support, you're probably not paying for the Red Hat support, so how do the expect to make revenue?

Re:Where's the money?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're obviously new here. Of course these shops will have their on in-house IT staff that know what's going on. But when the shit hits the fan, the staff want a backup plan, called RedHat Support. That's what paid support is for, and that's why Microsoft makes so much money selling Windows, even though we all know how much cheaper it is to run Linux/BSD.

The supporters can just shrug off and say "sorry" while they go to the bank, but the IT staff needs to say "even they fucked up".

While that is the cynic in my speaking, truth is, you need dedicated staff to run this kind of thing AND paid support. You can't have a fresh graduate do it and expect support to fill in the gaps in any realistic way.

Welcome to the IT world, where the beautiful promises of a technological tomorrow are backed by a lot of grunt work, voodoo, and incompetence.

Re:Where's the money?

[RobBebop]

how do the expect to make revenue?

Benefits of specialization. As the bottom level of the "Cloud Infrastructure" Red Hat can service customers who actually own the clouds better (i.e. cheaper) than they can service themselves.

Sure, Amazon *could* retain an internal staff to manage the server bits, but it is easier from them to worry about their application software and share the cost of managing the clouds with Red Hat's other customers.

Of course, there eventually comes a point in time when it will be cheaper for Amazon to simply BUY Red Hat and then things will get real interesting.

Re:Where's the money?

[wild_quinine]

If you RTFA, Red Hat is planning on getting it's revenue from selling support. I'm not sure I see this happening.

I'm pretty sure that's a good part of what they've been doing for a decade.

Wikipedia agrees with me: Red Hat partly operates on a professional open-source business model based on open code, community development, professional quality assurance services, and subscription-based customer support.

Re:Where's the money?

[Jim Hall]

If you RTFA, Red Hat is planning on getting it's revenue from selling support. I'm not sure I see this happening. If you're running a cloud service, you're going to have a LOT of machines and you're going to need enough custom support and custom software that you're probably going to have in-house support. If you have in-house support, you're probably not paying for the Red Hat support, so how do the expect to make revenue?

There are two kinds of support here:

Phone/web/email support, for problems and other issues. This is the traditional "help desk" or "support center" that you are probably thinking of.

Updates and system patches to keep your servers up-to-date with the latest software.

I work with lots of systems (over 1,100 servers ... about half of which run RHEL) and we need to run with both kinds of support. Sure, we probably have called Red Hat about half a dozen times in the last 5 years. But we need to have it there, should something go wrong. Am I wasting my money for that? No, because the times that we've needed to call support, we really needed it. You don't pay for support because you know you'll need it - you pay for support because you'll probably need it.

Yes, we have our own system support people, and most are RHCE. They can figure out most problems - but we still need to have RHEL there as a safety net.

I haven't RTFA'd, but I suspect Red Hat will offer some kind of volume discount if you have enough systems. Otherwise, it will likely be too expensive for some folks.

(Disclaimer: I work at a Big Ten university, and we don't actually run with "help desk" support on everything. Red Hat offers an "Academic" subscription to RHEL, so you still get patches and updates, but don't get phone support. We run with phone support where we need it - like to run third-party software, or in production - but for "dev" instances for our own development staff, we may choose to run "Academic" without phone support, at a much lower price per system. It works well for us.)

Re:Where's the money?

[nurb432]

It really does exist, for those people willing to pay the big bucks.

And sometimes you find they actually DO know what they are talking about, with their products at least. Once you get into the depths of the support structure you no longer see the 1st level 'by the book' call centers and discover that elusive developer.. who actually does have a clue.

Re:Where's the money?

[seifried]

If you are a technology company offering cloud computing than that is by definition your core competency, to completely outsource it is a pretty much guaranteed path to implosion, as there is no real point for your company existing. Look at what happened to manufacturing in America, it all went to China, and now the Chinese are figuring out they can make their own brand names (or simply buy American ones like Lenovo/Thinkpad) and cut out the middle man marketing/sales/etc and do it themselves.

Ultimate Pronouncement

[houstonbofh]

This is perfect. For years people have said "____ will be Linux." But "The Could" has almost as little meaning as "_____" so it gives specificity without having to be specific!

I actually use, and like Linux, but I hate marketing speak.

The height of irresponsibility

[tjstork]

Cloud computing and web centric computing is the height of all irresponsibility within the IT field. Network centric computing utterly depends on security and that means encryption. Defeating encryption depends on solving combinatorially difficult problems and it is still theoretically possible that this may well prove to be the case. At any given point in time, we may well wake up in a world where someone has proven P=NP and within a few short weeks from that point we would see utilities to easily forge SSL certificates, code signing, PGP, AES and pretty much every crypto system and identity assurance system out there. The resulting calamity would be so immense, that, it begs to wonder, why are we pushing technologies when we do not know if they will actually work?

Re:The height of irresponsibility

[dlgeek]

To be pedantic, number factoring isn't NP-complete and an algorithm to solve an NP-complete problem won't necessarily lead to one for integer factorization.

The bigger fear is quantum computers, with a proven algorithm to factor numbers in polynomial time (Shor's Algorithm). In fact, some research quantum computers have factored very small numbers (ex: 15) already.

Re:The height of irresponsibility

[fractic]

To be pedantic, number factoring isn't NP-complete

Yes it is. In 2002 the AKS primality test was discoverd proving that testing for primality is P. As a result factorization is NP because we can check if a given factorization is correct in polynomial time.

Re:The height of irresponsibility

[hansraj]

...that testing for primality is P. As a result factorization is NP because we can check if a given factorization is correct in polynomial time.

Factorization is in NP irrespective of whether primality testing is in P or not. You can check whether a given factorization is correct or not by simply multiplying the claimed factors. The result you cite proves that factorization is in coNP (the complement of NP).

Re:The height of irresponsibility

[hansraj]

Ummm.. when you are discussing whether a problem is in NP and/or in coNP you normally have a decision problem in mind. So the problem here is not "What are the prime factors of n?" but rather "Does n have a non-trivial factor less than m?"

By repeatedly asking this question you can eventually get the prime factors of any number.

Of course you can make the decision problem "Does n have a prime factor less than m?" in which case you would indeed need the AKS result, but I believe the former variant is more common since talking about primality of factors (like in the latter variant) only complicates the issue without changing the complexity of factorization (the usual "give me prime factors of n").

Re:The height of irresponsibility

[hansraj]

I know this is slashdot but that is the single most ridiculous analogy I have ever seen in my life. Are you implying in any way that the possibility of P turning out to be same as NP or factorization being in P after all is the same as possibility of dragons existing?

While dragons are not proven to not exist, one can make reasonably good plausibility arguments about their non-existence depending on what characteristics your dragon has, whereas these big questions have no plausibility arguments for settling either way. But that is not even an issue here.

How many times does reality offer you a surprise? Not many I would guess. Mathematicians on the other hand frequently come up with very surprising results. And if you were basing your analogy on the assumption that there is a consensus about the status of these big problems, then you are mistaken.

Good typing...

[houstonbofh]

Nice.... Close to the top and I misspell "cloud." Friday can't come soon enough...

Re:Good typing...

[MightyYar]

"The could" is in a way a more appropriate term. Could computing - I like it.

Re:Good typing...

[Anonymous Coward]

"The could" is in a way a more appropriate term. Could computing - I like it.

Inteviewer: "Do you see could computing opening up doors to video analysis?"
Whitehurst: *shrugs* "I don't know, it could ... see, that's the beauty of 'could computing.'"
Inteviewer: "Right, I'm familiar with the name ... now, was benefit does this have over a low level distributed system or a Beowulf cluster?"
Whitehurst: "It certainly could have more benefits. Then again, it's possible that it could not. See, could computing could open up your wildest imaginations ... maybe."

Re:Good typing...

[geekoid]

I thought it was a very clever pun.

Becasue there isn't a real definitions for 'the cloud', but there are a lot of people saying 'it could be this' or ' it could be that'

Re:Good typing...

[kestasjk]

Everyone misspells "cloud", the correct spelling is "internet".. Just because people draw a cloud on diagrams to symbolize the internet doesn't mean we should call it "the cloud".

I don't know how people who know what the internet is and where the name came from can stand it.

(As you can tell by my sig this is a pet annoyance)

Re:Does that qualify as irony?

[CaptSaltyJack]

Well, a bunch of Wiki editors agreed on a definition.

Cloud Computing and OSS Strategy

[RobBebop]

The article claims that Red Hat's new CEO, Jim Whitehurst, is the former COO at Delta Airlines, so a sky-related term like "Cloud Computing" is appropriate.

Further down in the article they clarify the confusion in the article summary. Amazon pays big bucks to Red Hat for support so they don't have to worry about the massive infrastructure of servers (clouds) that run their online sales business. Similarly, Google uses Red Hat to deploy a percentage of their search business, but they don't pay for it because they maintain it all in-house.

Ubuntu isn't competition because that organization isn't selling support. Jim quite astutely points out that Red Hat is not a software company (because the bits are free). Red Hat is a support company who has the capability to manage, maintenance, fix, and upgrade mission critical software for its customers. Ergo, Ubunutu doesn't compete with them, but Suse/Novell does.

This shouldn't be anything new to the Slashdot audience, but since it made it to the mainpage I figure it is worth clarifying.

Notes on Linux for Clouds

[RevWaldo]

- Supported by the Free Stratosphere Foundation.
- The latest version is Sneaky Stratus but Crafty Cumulus is now in beta.
- An open-source version of Rainbows exists but Microsoft owns the license to the visible light portion of the spectrum and is currently seeking an injunction in federal courts.
- The lightweight version is usually recommended. The full-featured version (Nimbostratus Ultimate) may overload your cloud, resulting in fog.

Re:Translation please...

[geekoid]

Value: Get your ass someplace fast.
Extract: Extracting monetary profit from society.

It's wrong, the airlines can make a profit, but we are in a standoff.
Once the people with the deepest pockets are the only ones left, prices will go up; which is what needs to happen. They cast for a ticket doesn't cover their Total cost.

distro elitism is part of what sucks people in

[SaberTaylor]

reference
http://xkcd.com/456/