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.

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:Good typing...

[MightyYar]

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