Slashdot Mirror
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.
Microsoft... complains about something because it is too secretive? wasn't this in the book of revelations somewhere?
Obama is a twitter sock puppet
Openness implies lower barriers to entry. If they control the technology, they control the admission price. If you want to play on our 'cloud' then it's going to cost a CAL.
Sig this!
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
Open Standards never work
So how did you manage to post that?
You don't have to maintain infrastructure to deal with your peak loads. You just have to keep enough to handle the baseline and than when you get hammered, you "turn on" more "computers" as you go. In theory, those "computers" could be located anywhere, so if you are mentioned on some UK news show and get hammered over there, you can "turn on" more of your "computers" to handle the load and turn them off when you are done.
In other words, basically, you have an infinite amount of computers which start almost instantly that you pay by the hour/minute for. Each of them boots off a standard image you control and all of the service providers have ways to script things like "hey, I've just been booted! lets tell the load balancer to add me to the pool!"
In yet other words, it is basically like a distributed virtual server. Take a single image and on-demand, load up as many virtual servers as you need.
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!
I think Microsoft is trolling. In this specific troll posting they are exploiting the fact that people don't realize that an open standard process does not necessarily result in an open standard. The reality is probably that the manifesto group is not willing to get subverted by them ('subvertible' is MS's definition of 'open').
Their mode of action seems to be: first try to subvert a standards process to introduce proprietary technology into it, thus giving itself an advantage; if that fails, call the process "not open enough". Proceed to form a new "more open" standards process stacked with Microsoft partners that competes with the existing one.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
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.
For starters, you will not run your HIPAA compliant health care system or your damn investment bank datacenter using some random shmucks pool of servers. That is silly. Privacy issues aside, both systems probably have very predictable loads and wouldn't benefit from cloud computing.
Second, even if you did, you'll probably be able to specify which data centers your virtual machines will run. After all, they want to charge you more for running stuff overseas!
Third, you aren't the market. Startups and web companies with spikey traffic are. If you have a predictable amount of traffic, odds are good this kind of provisioning would cost more. But if you are prone to unpredictable spikes, or you just don't want to deal with maintaining your own equipment, this is probably a good deal.
Lastly, just because RMS says something is evil, doesn't mean he is right. I'll just leave it at that. I know you didn't specify the keyword "RMS", but rest assured that there are a lot of "haters" who have never even heard of the term before that windbag piped up. Now they hate it without even knowing what it means (kinda like how RMS hates it without understanding it).
This statement makes no sense. You take advantage of it by *not* using it. That is the point. You only pay for what you use and no more. Prior to cloud computing (okay, the term is kinda silly), you'd have to provision for your peak load. Now you just provision for your baseline and fire up a potentially infinite pool of servers during peak loads.
So in other words, the "Microsoft is opposing such a Wonderful Thing (tm)" is all speculation?
Yes you might justifiably call that FUD but In view of past experience with Microsoft, I'd say this sort of speculation is a lot more likely to turn out to be true than if we were dealing with any other randomly selected evil mega-corp. Micosoft is sitting on a hugely profitable dominant market share in a number of areas. If they lose a significant proportion of that market share they will find it significantly harder to regain that market share than it was to lose it. I'd say it's a safe bet that executives@microsoft.com spend a lot of time these days being paranoid about repeating past mistakes like when they slept through the search engine revolution and suddenly woke up to find that Google had mushroomed into a dangerous rival in a key market segment almost over night. To add insult to injury Google had actually achieved a dominant market share in that very important market segment and has proven frustratingly capable of defending it.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
From someone that is following this closely from within the "cloud services community", has read every article, every relevant blog, twitter, forum, and newsgroup post, I hope I can bring some enlightenment to this issue.
The CCIF is an organization that is supposed to be little more than an "open forum" between those in the cloud services community. I'm not certain if its role should even be to make such statements or issue documents, but if it is, that those statements should be discussed and agreed upon by its members. This manifesto appears to have been created secretly by the founders of the CCIF without discussion, review, or disclosure directly in contrast to the goals and promises of the CCIF. Instead, that review and disclosure only happened behind closed doors with "large companies" such as Microsoft and IBM. As I made it quite clear on the CCIF newsgroup, regardless of the origin of the document, it is of my opinion that the CCIF as an organization should not endorse any documents without a vote by its members.
So far, it seems the plan is that the CCIF will officially release this document on Monday, prior to the meeting it will hold on Thursday in NYC. I hope that those behind the scenes here realize that the best course of action is to wait until Thursday and secure a vote by members present at that time.
Moving system images around isn't that tough to do, but moving the context of that image and it's data are still challenges that lead to differences between the VM providers. If it were as simple as "provide an image", then there wouldn't be much of a market for the cloud computing providers to compete over.
This is a young industry. It's far too early to try to standardize on stacks beyond those being provided by the players in the cloud industry. Sure one could pick a stack of best-of-breed FOSS solutions for the raw technology, but that's not going to address the real interoperability costs of getting the raw data closer to the users without losing integrity.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.