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Microsoft, Amazon Oppose Cloud Computing Interoperability Plan
thefickler writes "Microsoft is opposing an industry plan, the Open Cloud Manifesto, to promote cloud computing interoperability. Officially, Microsoft says the plan is unnecessarily secretive and that cloud computing is still in an early stage of development,
but there are allegations that Microsoft feels threatened by the plan because it could boost Linux-based systems. The goal of the group behind the manifesto, the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum (CCIF), is to minimize the barriers between different technologies used in cloud computing. And this is where the problem seems to lie, with the group stating that 'whenever possible the CCIF will emphasize the use of open, patent-free and/or vendor-neutral technical solutions.' Some speculate that Microsoft is actually worried that this will allow open source systems, such as Linux, to flourish, at the expense of Microsoft technology."
Amazon is also declining to support the plan, saying, "the best way to illustrate openness and customer flexibility is by what you actually provide and deliver for them." Reader smack.addict contributes a link to an O'Reilly piece asking what openness really means for cloud computing.
In the computer world, whenever there are a few entrenched players, the opposing companies often join together to try to counter their power, and they often do it in the name of interoperability and standards. So while in this case it looks like Amazon and Microsoft are the bad guys (let's be honest, Microsoft is always the bad guy), in reality it is just a matter of their competition trying to get a piece of the action. Who are the supporters of the CCIF?
IBM
SUN
CloudCamp
Zero Nines
and some others.
Similar to when Facebook started becoming the dominant social networking site, a few of the others got together to try to make a public API so it is easy for users to switch between sites. Typical corporate politics.
Qxe4
Maybe it really is too early to focus on standardization. It often freezes the standard quo and makes it harder to implement new stuff, c. f. the x86 and Windows requirements for backwards compatibility. I also don't really see where the problems are (others might have more experience there): EC2 uses standard Xen instances that should be somewhat portable. The only non-portable part is the meta-level configuration.
Fleur de Sel
I mean that's exactly what you said about the iphone 3 months ago, that it needed to be open since closed systems are things of the past....
Queue expected sarcastic eye roll.
You are who you are, let no one tell you different. But, never close your mind to a new point of view.
Here are two excellent use cases:
It is 9/11 and slashdot was hammered. I am too lazy to cite, but they were shoving extra computers into the rack to keep the thing online (slashdot was pretty much the only place that wasn't hammered). With cloud computing, they'd just fire up as many extra servers as the load needs and turn them all off when they are done.
Dailykos. Election night. Rather than buying a shit-ton more hardware to handle such peak loads, they'd just fire up as many extra "computers" as they need and pay for like 24 hours of use.
Your Blog. Slashdot, Digg, Fark and New York Times link to your article about Captain Kirk. Too much traffic? Nonsense... fire up a pool of servers in the cloud and turn them off when you are done!
Is anyone able to link to or post up devil'd advocate on closed source cloud? There's got to be some advantages to it, and we need both sides represented here to compare them.
Really far-out R&D is expensive with no expected near- or medium-term payback. So it tends to be funded by companies that can charge monopoly rents, like Microsoft or old AT&T. It cannot be supported by providing competitive open services, so a closed cloud will result in more basic research and greater long-term innovation.
It's a scheme to get us all back to using low resource hardware to connect to the net, which will store all our apps and data so we have to pay to access them. The idea is to eliminate privacy, "piracy", and of course FOSS.
Caveat Utilitor
First, the "cloud" doesn't run on anything. The "cloud" is basically a metaphor for an virtually infinite amount of servers you can fire up running your system image at once. It doesn't mean your instances are "floating" around a pool of servers--those images are running on real servers in some dudes rack and each running instance is indeed mapped to one server. If the physical server your instance is running on dies, oh well, you just fire up your image somewhere else. If you looked in the data center, you'd just see a bunch of regular servers running something like VMWare ESX (or whatever) and a bunch of fancy scripts to load and provision customer's images across the data center. You'd probably also see some serious SAN shit too.
All your instances typically connect to the same pool of shared, perminate storage. Each instance (at least on EC2) gets a couple hundred gigs of temporary disk space that goes away when you shut down that instance.
With Amazons EC2 (the only one I've played with), you can shove anything into your disk images has long as it is x64 or x86. "Anything" could be Windows Server, Linux, Sun, FreeBSD, whatever. You can download a lot of pre-build images from the community too--like "here is FreeBSD /w useful stuff already installed".
The trick right now is everybody has different ways to fire up said images. And once they are fired up, the API's your software must interact with are different. One guys way of provisioning an IP address or mounting a disk is different than another.
But this is to be expected. The whole industry is far to young to ask for standards.
And this is exactly why it will fail!
If you have been following the news the governments of the world have become extremely NOSEY! This means (and I am right now personally experiencing it) companies DO care who and what is being shared. In my case we do not want servers in certain jurisdictions. I work for an investment bank, and my laptop does not go outside of Switzerland.
Look at what happened to wikileaks in Germany. Or look at what private banks have been advising their bankers! They say no travel outside of Switzerland.
Right now "cloud computing" is completely ignoring this issue and it will come back to haunt them.
That's why I am extremely skeptical that cloud computing will take off. Since those that would and can pay for it will not take advantage of it.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Amazon does use some kind of virtual machine images (just running the stuff under Xen I think?). They *should* make it so VMWare, qemu, etc. images could be converted to AMI (Amazon Machine Image) files though, I certianly agree.
See Reuven's post. Certainly the CCIF leadership was involved, but to my knowledge, It was led by IBM, who doesn't want to be named so they don't make it look like an "IBM initiative". See this CNet article for more information on how IBM approached Microsoft.
IBM completely fumbled the ball here, they were disorganized and got their PR organization to call people up 1 week ago to sign the document, a fait accompli. You might be able to do that to smaller cloud companies, but you don't fucking do that to Microsoft and expect acquiescence.
Haters? What on earth are you blathering about?
Anyway -- your off-the-wall characterizations aside, here in the U.S. bandwidth is still too expensive/unavailable for "the cloud", even if we wanted it. Lots of people still have a hard time streaming videos reliably.
THANK-YOU...
This is exactly what I was talking about. The cloud computing intiative is completely missing these aspects. And it is these aspects that will form the future of computing.
In 1999 I said at a conference that the future of computing is not in the algorithms, but in the data that the algorithms manipulate.
I said if you had the choice in 1999 to destroy either the harddisk containing the data, or the harddisk containing the algorithms, which would you choose?
Answer the algorithms. What this means is that algorithms are important, but data is more important. Thus by promoting cloud computing you are promoting that the algorithm is more important than the data, and in reality that is not the case.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"