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Open Source Facing a Difficult Battle For Cloud Relevance
A recent eulogy for open source's relevance to cloud computing by Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady caught the attention of Matt Asay, who breaks down the difficulty of this David and Goliath problem. "In a world where horsepower matters more than the software feeding those 'horses,' in terms of the entry cost to compete, and where big vendors like Amazon and Google are already divvying up the market, the odds of a small-fry, open-source start-up challenging 'Goliath' are slim. It's not a new argument: Nick Carr has been suggesting for some time that only a few, big companies can afford relevance in this hardware-intensive business. Given this fact, O'Grady thinks the best we can hope for (and he thinks it's pretty important) is 'a loose coalition or confederation of [open-source] projects and vendors that will together comprise an increasingly viable top to bottom alternative to some of the cloud providers today.' He includes projects like Puppet (Reductive Labs) and Hadoop in this mix, but is careful to point out that he doesn't see a full-fledged, open-source alternative seriously challenging the closed platforms of Google, Amazon, Salesforce, and the other mega-clouds."
But if open-source can hit the bullseye, the rest of the dominoes should fall like a house of cards. Checkmate.
Really, is this situation THAT MUCH different from what we have today?? What are the chances of a small mom-and-pop start up create a virtual bookstore to rival Amazon, or an Internet services infrastucture empire to rival Google??
should be "Cloud computing facing a difficult battle for Relevance"
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Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
Salesforce runs on ~ 1000 Dell servers (and thats with redundancy). Hate to say it, but Salesforce is a great example of making a very slim product (it only did just barely enough to begin with) but very efficient. The products limitations are endlessly frustrating but the sales pitch was fantastic. Salesforce is not about spending huge amounts of Money - its about making it. They have 55,000 customers and 1.5M user accounts...
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/23/the-efficient-cloud-all-of-salesforce-runs-on-only-1000-servers/
Cloud computing is inefficient, expensive, sensitive to outages, and is vulnerable to all sorts of new types of security issues. Why do we need this again?
Aren't those vendors built on top of open source? If I remember correctly, Google uses their own Linux distribution, Amazon uses redhat, and I have no clue what salesforce uses but I imagine that it's probably some form of open source OS since they can save a lot of time and money using that instead of Windows when we're talking thousands of servers. The cloud revolution, if anything, was brought on my open source since it's made deploying thousands of servers cheap and easy. If the companies had to pay for licensing of software on all of those servers or roll their own OS, they would have built up (buying fewer, more powerful servers) rather than building out.
Maybe I'm missing something big here, but isn't "cloud computing" largely just a data delivery service, and not really "software"? It's kind of hard to get a handle on "cloud computing" since it's such an amorphous buzzword. Can someone give me a real example of an application that's "cloud computing" based. I thought my little weather app telling me the temperature might be defined as "cloud computing".
If the above is true, I don't see how OSS can really make some big impact on "cloud computing" any more than it can make it on websites. If it's not true, how could OSS big a big player in "cloud computing"?
AccountKiller
Unfortunately, this is where OSS is weak. The larger companies (Google, Amazon) can afford the large iron and backend storage stacks [1]. For the uptimes that modern cloud storage has, the equipment costs are tremendous, because the machines that are able to do the large volume I/O over the net not just have to have performance, but be engineered around reliability, and that means large clusters distributed over geographically different regions storing identical data.
I don't really see how an open source solution can compete here, unless it received funding from governments or research institutions. Reliable cloud storage is all about physical hardware.
The only way I can see an OSS cloud appearing is if someone makes a program that would get clients to set aside part of a hard disk. Then, when someone writes to the cloud, the central server encrypts the data, then splits the data among clients assuming that relatively few will be up, and able to be connected to via an application. Ages ago, there was a LAN level utility for the Mac (worked on System 6 and 7) which created a virtual Appleshare drive by using a chunk of hard disk space from all the linked up machines, and using encryption (or obfuscation) to ensure that only the administrator had full access to the share.
Scaling a utility that keeps track of every write, how many splits (including redundant ones) and where would be extremely daunting. It may be doable, but it would not even come close to the performance of a commercial cloud. Reliability is iffish, especially after a long time as participating machines get reinstalled over time, so the central storing program would have to keep shuffling data around. Of course, unless architected right, there is a central point of failure with the machines that assign the bits to the client machines.
Legal issues also apply. A cloud that is completely open will eventually be used for storing information that is highly illegal in some countries. Would someone participating by offering some HDD space be able to be charged with possession, even though they had an encrypted chunk inaccessible to them? This is very hazy legal territory. Some areas of the world could say its like storing a friend's safe full of doobies; its not accessible, but can still be considered possession.
[1]: I'm calling it a stack because there are a number of layers before bits flung into the cloud hit a physical platter, from distribution among sites, to optional encryption, to an accounting system to not just know how much is stored, but how much for how long, then finally passing the objects to a backend database.
I don't see how Open Source is not more relevant with the advent of cloud computing - sure no small startup can put up a gigantic server farm, but who cares when what's running on all the servers is open source software, and the services written atop THAT are also using open technologies?
There's plenty of room for a small open source company to add a ton of value atop the raw cloud space. Having so many options means businesses will be grateful to anyone who can cull down the selection to a small set and make it easy to work with. Think "Apple in the Clouds".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Come on people, most of Google's and Amazon's could are run by Linux / BSD with costume modifications to adapt to the task at hand.
If the article would state that these companies are not giving back much to the community in relation to what they take, then yes, that's probably true but they still rely heavily on OSS software.
For me the whole article completely misses the point, but maybe I'm missing something here.
Also: cloud computing is not going to take over everything. It is useful for certain situations like massive indexing, data backup storage and some forms of HPC (though the last group mostly build their own data centres or rely on distributed computing). The everyday business will not participate much.
It's really hard to see how free software isn't relevant to "cloud computing" services when you can basically build your own using them. Apache/MySQL/Php can let you build quite a bit...maybe that's not enough to be cloud certifiable er...certified but it works for me.
The other issue here is market leadership and time-to-market. Admittedly this speed is somewhat lacking the free software world because the motivations are different but in the long run, free software will win out as it allows more of the best minds to collaborate to build better systems. I'm looking forward to a user/customer owned coop cloud solution and perhaps another one that consists of ready-to-download virtual machines that I can run on my own hardware wherever it may be. A project called Eucalyptus is a step in the right direction in this space.
Some of these network services are starting with the right ethics in mind and it's those we should be talking up. With identi.ca, libre.fm, Eucalyptus and other projects making progress each day, free software(not open source) is anything but dead.
From a legal standpoint, it's often much easier for a corporation to use open-source software on its servers ("cloud," if you will) than to distribute it. I work at one of the Big Companies mentioned in the article, and have seen firsthand this fact affect technology choice. So moving to a cloud model will probably increase the usage of open source software.
If the article is trying to say that a cloud model may force us to depend on corporations to do computing, well, perhaps... but of course we're pretty much dependent on corporations for things like food, housing, etc. already, so it's hard to say that's a big new deal.
The article says, "Look around. The big vendors controlling IT and the Web are...the same vendors that controlled it yesterday, and are likely the same vendors that will control it 10 years from now." Yeah, look around, who were the major players in IT in the 70's? How many of them are still around? Of those, how many are major players today? IBM, HP, that's all I can think of. Microsoft wasn't a major player, neither was Apple.
Take a look around, how many companies from the Dow Jones Industrial Average were around 100 years ago? Of those were any of them bug names at the time? Heck, IBM didn't make it onto the DJI until 1979. The AT&T that is on the DJI now didn't get on the list until 1999 (the old AT&T was on the DJI back in the day, but that was a different company).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
That is called FUD. Get the current buzzword related to technology, and just go and make like the OO movement is off the hook on it.
--- "When you gotta do something wrong. You gotta do it right. (Fighter)"
While all the corporations go for "cloud computing" and turning your computer usage into a service paid for by hourly or monthly subscription, to the point that if you want ANY corporate backed OS and/or userland and GUI you pay a subscription, people who actually care about controlling their hardware and what their clock cycles are used for will turn to FOSS so they can have a real OS to do their work with, unlike all the idiots buying into cloud computing that could get by with a simple SSH tunnel...
Red Hat's oVirt http://ovirt.org/
Cloud computing technologies are NOT about (or only about) big box companies hosting your applications. They are about the ability to host them where ever you want when you want, from big companies to local server farms to *gasp* the user's desktops. The next generation of application after cloud computing will have to do with being able to leverage computing resources anywhere and anytime with automated failover and resource sharing.
Further, economy of scale only goes so far, that is why every company in NOT a giant corporation. At a certain size you don't get additional benefits from specialization and the additional size just adds overhead. If you hiring a plumber, maybe you just need 1 guy who knows what he or she is doing, not a corporation behind him. Once you have a handful of staff members monitoring your servers and nothing else you have gotten all the benefit from specialization (economy of scale) and now you may just be adding needless overhead as you get larger. Large companies can negotiate additional discounts sometimes, but as margins on hardware or whatever become thinner, the discounts become less and less.
The point here is not that no applications should be hosted by large outside vendors but rather that different solutions are now available to all datacenters depending on their size and need. Don't fear cloud computing, but don't believe industry hype. It is just a technology that allows you to more efficiently use resources on an as needed basis.
Last thing to remember, a monitor and keyboard with a "run of the mill" processor is only a little more expensive than on with a "can only run virtual apps" processor, and you still might need that same processor on the back end anyway and that network isn't free either.
...is up in the air.
And in other, related news, Cloud Computing itself is facing a difficult battle for relevance in the first place...
'In a world where horsepower matters more than the software feeding those "horses"...'
Wrong already! Software does the work - the "what" of solving problems. Hardware, while of course necessary too, is basically a fungible commodity - the "how". To use a counter-intuitive but revealing analogy, software is like the car while hardware plays the role of fuel.
Good software is still fairly rare, whereas state-of-the-market hardware can be cheaply and plentifully obtained from several alternative sources. So the article has it exactly the wrong way round: it's software that is important, and hardware that plays the supporting role.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
I'd suggest that they are likely to grow to being an important part of computing, but no bigger than, for example, the large-server-and-Oracle part. (full disclosure: I'm a capacity planner, so most of my income comes from just that part).
The disadvantage is that my cost per transaction is greater than if I had a steady load and ran my own machine room. The fees I and the other customers pay a cloud service have to cover their whole machine room, whether it's it's busy or not, plus their profit.
So I see a natural evolution for a growing business. While they're small, they'll build a LAMP or Java stack on a small machine in the back room. If they grow slowly and steadily, they'll buy more, larger machines for the back room. If they grow without bound, they'll jump to LAMP-on-cloud or Java-on-a-cloud, with a few code changes as possible.
Once they have mastered that, they'll move back and forth, depending on the business growth rate. If they grow too fast, they'll do a lot in the cloud. If they grow slowly, they'll have a cloud presence, but try to process as much in their own machine room as they can, to improve the profit margins, using the cloud for overflow and to run during my machine-room upgrade.
Conclusion? common software between the cloud and the machine-room is important. Look for any standards developing in the LAMP/SAMP space, like the DMTF incubator at http://www.dmtf.org/about/cloud-incubator Look for Java offerings for business, like http://blogs.sun.com/cloud/entry/communityone_cloud_recap When you're there, specifically look for virtual machines that will run in the cloud. Finally, look for load-balancing mechanisms that will send your work to two different places, under your control, sometimes called "application distributors".
Don't assume open source is at a disadvantage: if you can run your stack on a free VM on a standard-conforming cloud, however commercial it might be, then your computing can remain free of the control of others.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
The higher costs of service versus localized computing has been a known drawback since the beginning. It's part of the drive too, in the expectations of huge profits and / or market-share.
That doesn't mean that open source can't participate, it just means that the big players are the big players. It's not that much of a switch really, money drives a lot of things and "free" does too. I imagine in the drive for domination of the market, the big boys will be clamoring to have other software hook into their cloud resources. Certainly I imagine that will be a part of Google's strategy, leveraging their bandwidth and server farms to become infrastructure for others.
In the end, how is this so different from how the Internet has been so far? I don't mean technically or end-user experience, I mean in the nature of open source competing with closed. It's definitely a switch from desktop computing, but online services are already available in both "free" and various pay models.
Most of the key components of those "closed" platforms were made open by that companies, or being open and already being widely used. What makes them hard to compete with is more pure horsepower, and human factors than them using closed or open source.
I wonder how many people are willing to pay a 25% premium to run Windows on Amazon EC2?
It may be difficult for any startup, open source or not, to gain a foothold here. But when you're looking to reduce costs as much as possible, to sell a utility computing model, I don't see why you'd be adding extra software costs right away.
In fact, the summary mentions other things, like Puppet and Hadoop, that make an impact.
I don't know that anyone is claiming open source could provide such a service, any more than open source could provide free and open hardware. Even if you have a completely open design, you still probably need some sort of corporate entity to build and sell it.
But at the same time, I don't see why any "cloud" provider in their right mind would pass up things like Puppet or Eucalyptus. Indeed, this is exactly the kind of place where the typical objections to open source hold no water -- merely providing a service is most likely not going to force you to disclose any changes, and that assumes you have to change the project at all.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I'm equally confused, and am wondering whether the author meant to say "open standards" instead of "open source". Whether open standards could dominate the cloud seems like a much more sensible discussion to have.
OSS isn't releveant to something that's totally irrelevant. So how releveant is OSS?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Personally I see could computing as a form of distributed computing. The current infrastructure given by Google, Amazon, etc. I do not see as very distributed since they run a few huge data centers. If they are taken offline then that is a major hit to the overall infrastructure. What I envision as cloud computing is that everyones computer using the cloud acts as a node in the whole infrastructure. Serving pieces of applications and data that reside on the cloud. I have mentioned this idea before and someone made similarities to a giant botnet or I see it as similar to a torrent network. Anyways the current infrasturture given above is not what I envision as cloud computing infrastructure, more of a giant hosting infrastructure.
Gotta say, this sounds like a red herring to me. Although it may not look like it to those of us in the desktop generation, the cloud vendors are really providing us with a big computer, and operating it for us. If that big computer runs your custom Linux distro in a VM, is this materially different than running your custom stack on hardware provided and operated by your local ISP?
I think cloud hegemony more worrying. For a long time we've had different development camps focused on different technologies. But that didn't stop Microsoft buying Hotmail (though it raised eyebrows).
But imagine the potential for feudal-style woe if you're trying to sell your plucky "10,000 customers and growing rapidly" startup to Microsoft, when the entire operation runs inside a Microsoft competitors' cloud?
Or how about if you find yourself actively competing with your cloud vendor? iPhone app writers are facing this now. What if it becomes the prevailing situation?
Anybody else read that in the movie preview voice? It was really exciting until about the 3rd sentence.
Opensource _enables_ cloud computing!
Or are people really itching to spend money on Microsoft Cloud Server Enterprise Edition?
Can CIOs really be that stupid?
(that was a rhetorical question, you...)
I couldn't care less what the cloud, or SAS, or software is running _on_. What I care about is whether or not it provides open, standards-based interoperability.
Does Amazon s3 run on linux or bsd or WIndows ? I don't know, but I do know that I can't just connect over plain old SFTP or WebDAV without major gimmickry and transformation. (FWIW, providers like rsync.net do, in fact, allow direct, standards based interaction, so it's not impossible).
On the other hand, another cloud-like provider might run on a completely closed source, proprietary foundation, but if it provides plain old standards based interaction from the outside, who cares ?
If water droplets were to self-aggregate, you get a cloud. In other words, individuals have more storage and computing power spread collectively amongst themselves than any concentrated central source. If you can tap into that collective resource (see bittorrent, folding@home, SETI, etc.), then OSS has no barrier to entry. I like some of the cloud services, but for certain uses I would rather use my personal resources than trust another party.
This is like saying that a responsible citizen will never be able to replace a nation state, so we might as well give up. You, as an individual, or as an open source project, have a slim chance of replacing Google, or Amazon, or Salesforce. But, through an open source project, you can alter the rules of the game, and you CAN profoundly affect those big companies, how they operate, what work their employees do, what services they offer their customers, etc.
Could Computing is simply a service provided over the Internet that is scalable and virtualized.
In short the software is in the web browser, while the data is stored somewhere else like on the servers. The word "Cloud" is a metaphor for the Internet.
This is not just an ordinary web application, it usually involves a virtual machine of some sort so that the web applications acts like a desktop application within the web browser. One that can be scaled to handle an almost unlimited amount of users.
So for example the PHPBB2 Forum software is a web application, but not a Cloud Computing application. Google apps, on the other hand works via a virtual machine and software as a service so it qualifies for cloud computing applications. Google apps do GMail, Word Processing, Spreadsheet, etc in the web browser under a virtual machine but the data is stored on Google's servers.
The reason why open source developers don't support cloud computing is because they feel that it locks the users into third party technology and exposes their data across the Internet in violation of privacy that others could spy on it or capture it via packet sniffers. So OSS developers try to avoid making cloud computing applications as a matter of personal ethics, etc.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Below some (offtopic) thoughts on why cloud computing may not stay relevant (if it is, right now) into the future.
Wait a second...
Aren't both Amazon and Google both based upon open source platforms? Not to mention Yahoo, 37Signals, and a whole bunch of other "cloud computing" services.
Looks like OSS is doing pretty well in the cloud computing arena. What was he expecting? Someone writing an app that uses the processing power of third party Linux based systems to run a cloud like service while these PCs run their screen saver?
... didn't David won?
if open source could employ the bandwidth and computing powers of the masses, would it change the david vs goliath theme?
its more in the spirit of oss anyway.
Is Nick Carr just some academician who spins crazy theories just to get attention, and maybe make some money?
He seem almost like a professional troll, with sensationalist, often inflammatory, subject lines like "is google making us stupid."
Is there any reason to assume that Nick Carr knows any more about the future of IT than the average bum on the street? Okay, he's educated, since when have whack-job college educated predictors ever proven to be more accurate than flipping a coin?
The way I see it, cloud computing, at least in its current form, is a business model. It is a buzzword that helps print more money, in lieu of actual innovation. It's the internet's idea of a make-work project.
Open source cliques don't give a flying fuck about business models. Linux wasn't created to satisfy some whiney douchebag on CNet, it was created because it served the needs of a small niche of hackers, and it snowballed from there. The way things are right now, real geeks don't care so much about cloud computing, they see it as a fad that doesn't bring tangible improvements to the computing experience. Most providers' cloud stuff is just fully-automated VM provisioning anyway. What's the big deal ? Who cares if a server is really a VM sitting in some big-label datacenter ? There's nothing revolutionary about it. Frankly you could build a buzzword-compliant cloud using the Xen API and some ugly-ass python scripts. You don't need anything fancy, in fact the fanciest thing about Amazon's cloud is the front-end and billing system, IMHO.
If and when a legitimate need is identified, some kind geek will take the time to do it right. It smells like an Apache project to me... but without a clearly defined need, there is no motivation, and without motivation there is no open source project.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Costume modifications?... shouldn't it be clown computing or something?!?
Isn't a p2p cloud via the Internet the obvious solution to open-source's ability to compete with a proprietary cloud in some million square foot warehouse? After all, that warehouse is big and impressive, but the Internet is MUCH bigger and has all sorts of redundancies and local hubs, providing a local granularity to the p2p cloud that a few large warehouses can never match.
stuff |
When you have to have a fully running infrastructure, the little guy has no real chance of competing on the 'service' side of clouds.
Now, competing on what you run ON ( or under ) the "cloud", OSS can still be relevant.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Yet.
Once you get used to virtualization of your resources, clouds become 2nd nature and will open up to use by traditional businesses.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I realize I must be really behind the times or not real bright, I just can't seem to understand what cloud computing really is. I lease a web server and a database from a company I trust they take care of the maintenance and update for it. I'm pretty sure this web server and database is running on a virtual machine, it's accessed through either web services or through http so it's a cloud right? If i need more space I simply pay for a little more and like magic more space appears, I need a different technology (e.g. a php instead of ASP.NET) and once again like magic it appears.
I simply cannot understand what the difference between providing a server and database to someone for a fee, which has been going on for a long time now, and a cloud. I look forward to finally learning what the hell a cloud is because I just don't seem to get it.
Yes, I've read the wikipedia article on "cloud computing" too. I've also seen buzzwords come an go throughout the years, and have a decent understanding behind what they really mean.
Buzzwords like "cloud computing" are MEANT to be amorphously defined, so then you can just say "Yup, we've got -buzzword-. Buzzwords are defined to mean "whatever the customer thinks it means". A wikipedia article that defined is interesting, but not not definitive by definition.
If you COULD generalize, "cloud computing" is a service, not software. That's why talking about OSS with regard to "cloud computing" makes about as much sense as talking about selling cheeseburgers. I'm sure OSS could help both, but the relationship is indirect, not an overlapping one.
AccountKiller
The insanity of this article is that "Cloud Computing" has essentially been enabled by open source. Cloud computing is essentially putting huge data centres together with an architecture which supports massive parallelism. Hardware is cheap these days, but software before open source was expensive. And in the case of the OS that ran on that cheap hardware unreliable. Open Source has been the core enabler of companies like Google. Without technologies like Linux to build on Google and Amazon would not have been able to build out the infrastructure they have economically.
So what is this article saying? Well it seems to be saying that Open Source Vendors will not win in the Cloud space. Which is kind of an odd thing to say really, because Red Hat doesn't compete with the Googles and Amazons of the world. Once again we see the blinkered view that something is only worth anything if it can be sold for a pile of cash. The real power of Open Source isn't that some company can make a pile of cash by selling it; its that a pile more companies and individuals can save money by using it. How much money? Enough to allow the Googles and Amazons of the world to actually make a dollar themselves rather than shovelling it into software vendors.
As the article points out; there are some very serious software offerings that will help enable cloud computing - SpringSource dm Server being one of them, and OSGi in general. As discussed on slashdot earlier we need to start thinking about how to deal with data in a decentralized decoupled way in order to enable massive parallelism and redundancy.
Cloud as a service (give it data and a process and you get results) is one definition of cloud computing. The other is the architecture itself (large scale data management). In order to have cloud as a service, you need the architecture. And that's the biggest problem we have today. Designing a highly scalable architecture is not easy. And without this architecture (which is software based), some other company cannot just create their own cloud (which beats the security issues with cloud as a service). So once a good distributed software system (hadoop, open neptune, etc.) is 'perfected', this will be more possible.
And that should answer your question - the actual architecture itself for cloud computing, is the software which every machine in the cloud runs.
Live life to the fullest. It's not that life is short, but that you are dead for so long.
As with anything, it entirely depends on who you ask.
'Scalable' does seem to be nearly ubiquitous for the concept of what 'cloud computing' means. Virtualization is common, but not a prerequisite.
Your description seems to indicate that a 'virtual machine' in this context is referring to the more application-style of what runs in the browser behaving like an application. By and large, this style of making more extensive use of javascript to give a more 'desktop' feel to web applications is a mark of the 'Web 2.0' buzzword (though the context most widely credited with coining the phrase didn't speak to that at all). When people talk about virtualization in the cloud, they almost always refer to OS instances being executed with a virtualization layer abstracting them from the real hardware (and making some of the more fatal hardware situations appear more like a simple reboot to the os instance, and other imminent failures no problem at all). Some rely on higher-order application-level redundancy, and forgo the virtualization aspects (many of the IO intensive workloads are still very reluctant to embrace virtualization, for one). Others even rely on 'user-level' redundancy (i.e. user sees a problem, hits refresh).
Some think of a cloud as a computing resource in which the usage picture is highly dynamic without strict mappings to where things must happen.
Some think of Cloud as a sort of spiritual successor to 'Thin Client', often extended to the internet. Where Thin clients were almost universally thought of as essentially remote displays, the reinvention in the cloud context generally has a more sophisticated client that is fed data to interpret and manipulate, though it's nearly required that client-side data persistence not be a critical pre-requisite. A total destruction of a 'client' in this definition of cloud has little more permanent consequence than 'thin clients'. I.e., Valve's Steam, where you could throw your computer off the top of a building and theoretically recover all your purchases, and, for the games that support it, the settings you use. In steam, the coupling between client and 'cloud' is relatively loose (some aspects can operate completely offline, and save-games may not fit the definition) , whereas 'google apps' is relatively tight.
phpBB could be considered a 'cloud' application, so could BBSes, so could a lot of things if they came to popularity *right now* instead of when they did. Essentially, most all webapss meet *someone's* definition of cloud, and it's such a vague term with no authority behind it, no one can call them wrong for the most part.
I don't think OSS developers avoid making cloud applications no more than anything else. The actual code behind many cloud computing implementations is OSS (Hadoop for one), but people refer not to the software, but to the popular sites that use the software. OSS is a phenomenon built entirely around how software is designed and produced. By most all definitions of cloud computing, it is a phenomenon that is built entirely around how software is put into implementation, usually with the characteristics that the users don't even know what software they are really using.
As far as OSS goes, cloud computing might actually be easier in that environment. The companies know the value lies in the data being managed moreso than the software used to manage it, and will risk others leveraging more for the sake of outsourcing development costs to a community. However, the philosophy behind OSS, as you say, may naturally lead some to worry about control of their data.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Google Mail or MS Office Live / Hotmail is a cloud computing solution. Hosting your own exchange server isn't. I suppose your ISP or hosting provider's POP3 server would come under the cloud computing category as well.
Many of these large companies have opened large parts of what they use and contributed back to the community. It is expensive to provide maintenance on a private codebase. Sure, there is worry that a competitive advantage is compromised through others accessing the work, however that risk is weighed against the benefits of pushing the burden of maintenance onto a community willing to work without explicit cost. If your company does something exceedingly clever and unique that has a relatively generic requirement for a masssive, fast storage architecture, you may let the community maintain your storage software safe in the knowledge that your high-level clever thing is what you are really trying to profit from rather than generically solving problems of scalable data management.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Your weather.com systray icon isn't cloud computing, because it only shows the temperature. If it could display the radar maps showing cloud cover, THAT would be true cloud computing.
.. well I'd rather not, especially if I have to trust proprietary software.
This is an intentional metaphor.... regarding cloud computing and the recent Air France tragedy.
cloud computing has the extra baggage of leaks and lags and outages in comparison to your local system on an UPS, that you can reset and take control over to overcome problems while having a better since of securing data/passangers.
Of course it's amorphously defined. It's a CLOUD, fer chrissakes!
The CB App. What's your 20?
Is Nick Carr just some academician who spins crazy theories just to get attention, and maybe make some money?
He seem almost like a professional troll, with sensationalist, often inflammatory, subject lines like "is google making us stupid."
Is there any reason to assume that Nick Carr knows any more about the future of IT than the average bum on the street? Okay, he's educated, since when have whack-job college educated predictors ever proven to be more accurate than flipping a coin?
Don't know anything about Nick Carr, but...
Google (and the net in general) is affecting our long-term memory retention. Why bother to remember something when you can google it? Technology always affects our way of life, so this is nothing special, but it is worth mentioning.
Also, just for the record, if I could predict things in general with a coin-flip level of accuracy, I would be fucking ecstatic. All it would take is a few lottery tickets...
It's more than that, though. Cloud computing is going for "Infrastructure as a Service" (IaaS, one of the new buzz acronyms), seeking to replace most of what you currently use in a data center (hardware, racks, power, network capacity). There's big money to be had in this, but it's a niche market.
As far as I can tell, open source and Linux are being used far more widely in cloud computing than in corporate America. Cloud computing is going to be a cut-throat business, and it will be tough for companies like Microsoft to compete. Few of their usual dirty tricks work. And the cost of switching is low.
www.cfengine.org
puppet and the people that push it make me very, very worried.
OK Cloud computing takes the Server/Client model one further by hosting it over the Internet instead of just the local network. You are right that it is a buzzword, and it seems as if the definition is very vague and changes definitions depending on who is giving the definition.
Cloud computing is a service, but there is software involved, one of the definitions is software as a service. For example, Microsoft can have something like Live Office which is MS-Office as a service, and host it out for $99/year per user verses the cost of buying MS-Office 2007 for $399 or whatever it costs, and then host the user's Office file formats on their servers as well with an option to download. Prices may be different than what I gave as an example. But Google Documents offers the same service for free.
Did you know that Open Source Cheeseburgers really do exist? :)
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
What does CLOUD mean?
Client Licensed Outsourced User Data?
Computer Linked Overpriced Usable Datastorage?
Crap Listed Outrageous Unusable Dung!
Central Loaded Off Universal Diagrams?
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Really....
Facebook....
Twitter....
Additionally, I thought Google relies on Linux quite a bit, could be wrong.
Looks relevant to me!
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That is pretty much correct, cloud computing is a technology idea, it is just marketed as Google or MS hosting your apps. But successful cloud computing will require portability. Even if, for some reason, I want to host all my apps at company X, I am a total idiot if I don't know how to migrate them into another data center or bring them back home! Since this open system portability will be demanded, it is hard to see how open system cloud environments won't be mandatory. If you really understand cloud computing, you will also understand why MS is doing everything in their power to take down VM Ware. What is better, this is actually a battle the open source community can win. Not only can open source compete with players but applications can be packaged with an OS wrapper and largely preconfigured, your average user will no longer care what OS the application is in, just if they can use it.
What's more ESX server may not techinally be Linux (don't know how this is measured) but it sure smells totally Unix like to me (OK I am not an expert on this).
And yes, LOL bot nets are and early example of new computing trends.
We need to start using the Afero Gpl v3 license, in every pice of software that could be used in the internet. Starting by the Linux kernel ASAP.
It's the only way to stop being used by big companies (they call-it 'cloud computing', what a joke!)
What's in a sig?
Also, just for the record, if I could predict things in general with a coin-flip level of accuracy, I would be fucking ecstatic.
If you honestly can't do this in your head, then get an actual physical coin and carry it with you. On all decision problems you encounter, perform a coin flip. You will get coin flip accuracy for the problem at hand everytime!
I thought the whole point of cloud computing was to NOT have a single point of faliure.
So a consortium of open source advocates would be much more cloud than the SAAS of Google Amazon et. al.
What about incentives like Niftyname, an opensource HaaS system made by a French ISP? Or oVirt, the virtualization system from RedHat? Given how the "cloud" is ready today, I'd say those things are far from being late.. Maybe they need more attention?
It's kind of hard to get a handle on "cloud computing" since it's such an amorphous buzzword.
Just like software design patterns, cloud computing is a set of software deployment anti-patterns ;-)
run by Linux / BSD with costume modifications
Skinnable kernels? ;-)
Exactly with 2 to 4 servers spread across 4 data centers in the US and the UK we do just fine with unxsVZ autonomics running are own OpenVZ cheap and fast private cloud with great success.
There are many great GPL projects. With GPL unxsVZ running 2-3 servers in 4 datacenters in the UK and the US we have survived just fine, fried servers, being slashdotted (no URLs here ;), dumb rack space resellers, etc. How? With the important part of the cloud (cloud=marketing BS): Autonomics for HA for all three important web computing areas IaaS , SaaS and PaaS.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
why say the most obvious slashtarded thing you could think of in a matter of seconds?
Also, just for the record, if I could predict things in general with a coin-flip level of accuracy, I would be fucking ecstatic.
If you honestly can't do this in your head, then get an actual physical coin and carry it with you. On all decision problems you encounter, perform a coin flip. You will get coin flip accuracy for the problem at hand everytime!
Um, you don't seem to understand "in general". I even pointed out the thing with the lottery tickets, which you removed from the quote. If I could predict winning lottery numbers with 50% accuracy, I would be a very happy person. The point here is that you shouldn't assume a 50% prediction rate is bad if you're significantly more likely to be wrong through random chance. Weather prediction comes to mind..
Could Computing is simply a service provided over the Internet that is scalable and virtualized.
In short the software is in the web browser, while the data is stored somewhere else like on the servers. The word "Cloud" is a metaphor for the Internet.
You've misunderstood. It's the servers that are virtualized, not (necessarily) the clients. Indeed, cloud computing is not about the clients (that's "Web 2.0" that you've got mixed up with there).
[Leaving out lots of bits which stem from that basic error]
The reason why open source developers don't support cloud computing is because they feel that it locks the users into third party technology and exposes their data across the Internet in violation of privacy that others could spy on it or capture it via packet sniffers. So OSS developers try to avoid making cloud computing applications as a matter of personal ethics, etc.
Cloud computing does not need to be insecure (much of it is based on things like SSH and WS-Security, and nobody's claiming that they're desperately insecure) though it is up to you to make the best use of them. (Using them through a browser might be a less-good idea, but that's because browser security is a real nasty fight. But cloud computing is orthogonal to all that.)
There is also no inherent reason for lock-in at the basic service level (at the full Software-as-a-Service level, it's hard to avoid unless the software is available locally, but that usually involves dealing with the same software vendor anyway) though that will require some standardization. There are no real standards yet, of course, because this has all happened so rapidly; it's only now that we're getting to the point where it makes sense to standardize. You're welcome to come and participate, helping to make this a diverse way of handling computing power for many people for decades. But don't come expecting people to adapt just to fit your prejudices; if you want something, have a well-argued technical reason for it.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Okay, now I get that you're saying a coin flip gives no accuracy at all. I should have been more explicit with my original wish: If, at the time of any prediction I make, I could flip a coin and call the side, and be correct in my prediction every time the coin comes up on the side I called, I would be very happy.
At work, I just finished a 3 month project where we tried to apply cloud processing power (using hadoop, and internally developed version of bigTable) against a difficult problem set. We were starting to get the hang of things and producing results by the time the project period ended. But the Killer concept we learned after about a month was:
Have good node-provisioning and management software.
We wrote a few python scripts to move config files around and do auto-provisioning, but I think we should have spent more time on this. Given the amount of headache we all had to do to keep the cloud up and running. Stuff would break, and it took us often a long time to figure out the problem and then do something about it.
The office that took on the project after we left, was told to spend some time creating a better system admin, provisioning software suite or give up the project. Its not exactly sexy work to fix the behind the curtain problems, but they will bite you if you don't spend some time on it up-front.
Sig 'em boy!
I've been working on cloud at work and we broke it down this way.
;)
Cloud as a service: Which is like you said a platform to deliver distributed processing on various tasks. For example, do all your virus scanning on a network service that provides virus scanning so that you don't have to bother with keeping virus defs up to date, and provides other benefits.
Cloud as computation engine: Which is where you use the cloud to actually do the compute intensive tasks sort of the way google uses it. Following our AV example, if you use the cloud to do calculations on how many machines have had virus X on it, and then store all the viruses in the cloud to compare their various similarities and evolution and deployment patterns, you might come up with some very interesting conclusions about the sources of malware and their future. This uses the cloud too as a database to store the results for easy query ala BigTable. So in effect you're doing more traditional 'beowulf' type calculations. (insert slashdot joke here about beowulf
Sig 'em boy!
Professor Frink: Well, sure, the Frinkiac-7 looks impressive, don't touch it, but I predict that within 100 years, computers will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them.
Summary:in terms of the entry cost to compete, and where big vendors like Amazon and Google are already divvying up the market, the odds of a small-fry, open-source start-up challenging 'Goliath' are slim. It's not a new argument: Nick Carr has been suggesting for some time that only a few, big companies can afford relevance in this hardware-intensive business
Sure, if you start off with an assumption that that statement is and always will be correct then there may be a problem. But uh, why are we assuming it's correct?
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Isn't this Slashdot article pointing to the answer? http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/07/03/1248246 Check out: http://www-jpc.physics.ox.ac.uk/applications_cloud.html
OK let me set up this argument.
You set up cloud computing services with company ABC for $199 a user per year. All of your data is on the virtualized ABC servers.
You find out company XYZ has the same services for $99 a user per year. But Company ABC has your data locked into their virtual servers and they refuse to release the data or allow you to log into them and do the migration yourself. You don't want to lose X years of data, but you want a cheaper rate to save on your expenses.
Not only that but employees at company ABC might have downloaded the virtual server data on a laptop and then it got stolen or they sold the data to scammers, etc.
Suppose you wanted to create your own cloud system, neither ABC or XYZ would allow you to release the data from their virtual servers to your system.
This is a term called Data Hijacking or Hostage Data, that companies use to lock in customers to their products.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
First, Emulab has been around longer than Amazon's or Google's cloud. It's a bit stricter than GPL, being AGPL, in which any users that contact the service have to be given sourc code (i.e., even the server), which makes it difficult to legally use by big businesses. Second, Amazon at least is pretty likely to be running Xen and other GPL software under the covers.