Is Cloud Computing the Hotel California of Tech?

Prolific blogger and open source enthusiast Matt Asay ponders whether cloud computing may be the Hotel California of tech. It seems that data repositories in the form of Googles and Facebooks are very easy to dump data into, but can be quite difficult to move data between. "I say this because even for companies, like Google, that articulate open-data policies, the cloud is still largely a one-way road into Web services, with closed data networks making it difficult to impossible to move data into competing services. Ever tried getting your Facebook data into, say, MySpace? Good luck with that. Social networks aren't very social with one other, as recently noted on the Atonomo.us mailing list. For the freedom-inclined among us, this is cause for concern. For the capitalists, it's just like Software 1.0 all over again, with fat profits waiting to be had. The great irony, of course, is that it's all built with open source."

Comments

Simple

[Finallyjoined!!!]

Don't use them.

There's nothing like keeping your own data on your own system..

Re:Simple

[John Hasler]

Or even just keeping a copy of your own data on your own system.

Re:Simple

[FooAtWFU]

I'll hazard tech-saavy IT-oriented entities won't have problems with building APIs to extract their data from the cloud (they probably built the API to put data into the cloud to begin with). Random-User-Guy who puts all his contacts into his Hotmail address book (with no export functionality) will have a harder time of it.

Re:Simple

[sycodon]

So data checks in but doesn't check out?

That's more like the Roach Motel.

Re:Simple

[vertinox]

There's nothing like keeping your own data on your own system..

What if its not your data or not that important?

Re:Simple

[trevorrowe]

Or even just keeping a copy of your own data on your own system.

Thats why I don't call it "cloud computing", I prefer OPS (other peoples servers). Its more self-explanitory.

Re:Simple

[Anne Thwacks]

Hotmail address book (with no export functionality)

Which one is that? the normal one exports all your data to hackers.ru at the click of a mouse!

Re:Simple

[gnick]

Oh that's the Hotel CA reference.

I was thinking that I can stab it with my steely knife, but I just can't kill the beast...

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

data in but no data out is a data black hole...

Re:Simple

[jellomizer]

Sure. Except for the fact it costs more. And if there is a problem it is all your fault.

Re:Simple

[lavacano201014]

Well, it IS programmed to receive. (I probably butchered that lyric, I'm never sure what it actually is)

Re:Simple

[mbone]

Same thing, just for different species.

Re:Simple

[Z00L00K]

What you can use the cloud for is to have a few truecrypt volumes stored there as a backup in case you ever need them.

If someone gets at your volume they won't be any wiser.

Re:Simple

[AlXtreme]

And I was thinking along the lines of "This could be heaven, or this could be hell".

Cloud computing is eerily like the music industry, more news at 11!

Re:Simple

[maxwell demon]

Why? What could be a better phrase to describe something entirely clouded, than "cloud"? Keep the term and contrast it to "clear sky computing" where no clouds hide the sun (i.e. the data).

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Bingo.

Ever tried getting your Facebook data into, say, MySpace?

Let's see, you upload images and text onto Facebook. Now, what's stopping you from uploading the same images and text onto MySpace? _Nothing_.

The author's bitch is that you don't have a one-click Export-Import function. Should you? Should Facebook or whoever be required to make the structure that they have provided for free use on their system portable?

That's the business deal here. There's structural lock-in, but not data lock-in, in exchange for free use of the structure. If you don't like it, you're not required to use it, and even if you do, you remain free to use your images and text however you want.

I've got an Ubuntu computer here. It's loaded with data and configurations. If I migrate to Windows or Mac, it's going to take hours of work before the new box is 'my' box in the same way, though in the end it will be done. Is Ubuntu or anyone else an asshole because of that?

Re:Simple

[maxwell demon]

If it's not your data, you have to add liability, because after all whoever owns the data you are managing may some time want his current data back.
If it isn't important, why go to the trouble of storing it in the first place? Or are you storing it because it might become important in the future? Well, in that case, you better treat it like important data now.

Re:Simple

[roguetrick]

Ya'll down with OPS.

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

You can check out any time you like...

But you can NEVER leave.

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, you know us!

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

ya, its a hot mess. (rhyming)

Re:Simple

[DuckDodgers]

Your own servers don't necessarily cost much more. Check the pricing at Amazon http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/ for a 'Large Instance' with "7.5 GB of memory, 4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 850 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform". A reserved instance costs $910 per year plus $0.12 per hour, or $1961 per year. I can assemble a nice rackmount 1U RAID server with better computing resources than that for the same price. Multiply that by a few servers and a few years, and your cost savings over your own hosting / racks / UPs isn't going to be that high. And of course, nothing stops Amazon from raising the prices.

Also, EC2 gives the user no recourse if the system goes down for any reason, or if your data is lost. http://aws.amazon.com/agreement/ You get a 10% discount if the system uptime is less than 99.95%, but that's the extent of your rights. If you screw up, it's your fault. If Amazon screws up, it's their fault but your problem.

Now, the nice thing about Cloud Computing is scaling. When your magic startup starts generating massive throughput, you can just add resources to your EC2 allotment as needed. But for small deployments that don't anticipate sudden rapid growth, I don't get the appeal.

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

Re:Simple

[Hognoxious]

I was wondering what colitis smells like.

Re:Simple

[omeomi]

Don't use them. There's nothing like keeping your own data on your own system..

Or just use the Web Services APIs to get your data out... Google, Amazon, and Salesforce all offer APIs that make it relatively easy to move data in and out.

Re:Simple

[drsmithy]

I can assemble a nice rackmount 1U RAID server with better computing resources than that for the same price.

But you can't make it redundant, back it up, give it high-bandwidth connectiontivity, or maintain it for that price. The hardware itself, is by far the cheapest part of any server room.

But for small deployments that don't anticipate sudden rapid growth, I don't get the appeal.

Because building and maintaining any remotely reliable IT infrastructure is expensive and requires expertise that is, for most companies, utterly irrelevant to their core business.

Re:Simple

[hedwards]

Of course they should be. The information does not belong to them, they make money off of using your data to sell ad space. It's one thing for a site like /. to not have the ability to easily download ones content, and quite another for a site that regularly hosts things that a person actually cares about. Information here is of little value outside the context of being on the web, and often even little value in the proper context.

Just because it's a private business does not give them special rights to hold a person's information hostage or to potentially abuse the copyrights involved.

Re:Simple

[gnick]

It's wild buckwheat native to southwestern North America. So it probably smells like buckwheat.

Of course, never having been on a Little Rascals set, I have no idea what Buckwheat smells like.

Re:Simple

[treeves]

I'd rather NOT know what what an inflammation of the large intestine smells like, thank you.
From the song it does have a warm smell, so maybe it's not so bad.

Re:Simple

[JSBiff]

What it really comes down to is market demand vs supply. Let's not frame the discussion about whether or not XYZ is an "asshole" because they don't offer customers what they want. Let's not ask whether the government should mandate such things. Not all problems can be answered by the "Free Market", but this is one problem which *can be*. At some point, whether it's Google or someone else, someone will see a market opportunity - a way to make customers happier, and hopefully more loyal, by giving them something people seem to want - the security of knowing they are not "locked in" to your service.

Once a critical-mass of web services *offer* their customers that 'feature', it is likely that their competitors will need to follow suit in order to not lose too many prospective new customers. If I'm already locked in to your service, it might be hard for me to move, but if I know that another, comparable service exists, which I know makes it easier for me to make local backups, and to move my data to other providers, I as a consumer have at least some motivation to go with the provider who isn't trying to lock me in. That is to say, if I'm looking for *new* service, and am not already locked in, if I think I can avoid lockin with one of your competitors, that will at least be one factor in my decisions (even if it's not to begin with, the marketing department of the competitor can bring it to my attention and try to sell me on that idea).

Re:Simple

[Maudib]

EC2 is only a slice of their cloud though.

How much would it cost for you to build that rack with highly reliable hot swappable up to 1TB each (No cap on how many either I dont think) that backup to a file system replicated in about a dozen countries at the click of a button?

Then there is the message bus.
Then there is simple db.
Then there is the load balancing.
Then there is the fact that maybe I don't want the server all year, but only for 5 hours a week, so instead buying hardware I just ask for them on demand...

Building a server versus AWS is a false dichotomy.

Re:Simple

[TheKidWho]

Not today they wouldn't be, give it a few years however.

Re:Simple

[tsm_sf]

Let's see, you upload images and text onto Facebook. Now, what's stopping you from uploading the same images and text onto MySpace? _Nothing_.

TL;DR I don't use Facebook but you should listen to me anyhow because I'm providing an opposing viewpoint.

Re:Simple

[herojig]

Well, I think you are missing the point. Facebook is not about discrete uploaded data by one user. That's a part of it, but it's all about the interaction and glues between the data shared from your machine and others. I think we should give Matt Asay the benefit of the doubt, and assume that's what he meant. That gorp is impossible to recreate or to re-store locally. There is no real way to get any of that out (some would argue 'why would you?'). But from a knowledge perspective, social networks are group silos, and if the farm burns, so it all goes. One might ask 'so what?'. But apparently the article was written as a tribute to an old Eagles song, and not much else is revealed, and no smell of colitas here.

Re:Simple

[DuckDodgers]

Thanks. You make some excellent point. I admit, we spend a lot of time and effort (meaning, money) maintaining machines, connectivity, backups, and redundancy (RAID for data redundancy, in addition to backups, UPS and a generator for power redundancy, and separate ISPs for connection redundancy). It's a huge expense for a tiny company.

I'm just very nervous about entrusting the company meat and potatoes to an external business. If our stuff goes down because I screwed up - and it has happened - I can try to fix it immediately. If our power or internet connectivity goes down, I can work with the corresponding vendor to get it restored. If something goes wrong with my Cloud Computing setup, I am at the complete mercy of their technical staff. Instead of actively working to solve the problem, all I can do is stay on the phone with their tech support and hope they fix it. Naturally, I'd rather be working than waiting.

And of course, I'm at the mercy of the vendor. If they decide to shut down, I have to scramble to find replacement as quickly and painlessly as possible. If they decide to raise prices, I'm looking at an instant drop in operating income or else the expense of moving to another vendor.

I'm not saying the cloud is the wrong way to go. I'm just saying that I am nervous.

Re:Simple

[Antiocheian]

Now that's too bothersome.

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but there are managed hosting companies that address all the issues you raise above, and do it far better than Amazon/Sun/etc. ever could.

Re:Simple

[ukyoCE]

Some of the cloud services are quite compatible with vendor redundancy. When I looked into Amazon EC2 it was largely being billed as "extra" resources, not as your primary servers.

You could potentially have 3 cloud computing services, with a 3rd of your "servers" at each one, and a redundant load balancer setup that also crosses providers. This would also let you be sneaky and expand servers and bandwidth at whichever provider is cheapest at the time.

I'm just dreaming here, but I don't see any reason you couldn't do it. This only applies where you're providing the application of course, and not to hosted services like e-mail.

Re:Simple

[Kral_Blbec]

For what it is worth, it took me all of 2.53 seconds to find how to export my hotmail contact list as a csv file.

• Open Hotmail
• go to contact list
• use Manage drop down menu
• export
• enter confirmation captcha
• ....
• profit?

Re:Simple

[Knara]

They're not holding the information hostage. They still have it, from the same source they uploaded it from.

Saying that every service should be *required* to have a particular export to every other service is a good way to run banks, but not necessarily every business with user generated content.

Re:Simple

[Trepidity]

I don't think they should be required to provide easy export of data, but I think people should refuse to use services that don't, and aim to replace them with alternatives.

Your last example is a bit different. You can export all your data from Ubuntu; it just isn't in the same format Windows wants. Nobody is asking Facebook to export to some MySpace-compatible format. All I want is a way to export the data in some format. A .zip of all images I've ever uploaded would be fine, for example, or an XML file with an archive of sent/received messages.

Re:Simple

[Zalbik]

Let's see, you upload images and text onto Facebook. Now, what's stopping you from uploading the same images and text onto MySpace? _Nothing_.

The author's bitch is that you don't have a one-click Export-Import function. Should you? Should Facebook or whoever be required to make the structure that they have provided for free use on their system portable?

That's the business deal here. There's structural lock-in, but not data lock-in, in exchange for free use of the structure. If you don't like it, you're not required to use it, and even if you do, you remain free to use your images and text however you want.

So the Insightful comment here is bascially that there is no such thing as data lock in? After all, you can always recreate the data you put in. It's not like these services make it up...

Sorry, but that's a bit like saying "Microsoft Word documents aren't proprietary, you could always re-type the same thing in Open Office!".

The Facbook / MySpace examples are inane. Do people really really care so much about migrating their social networking data? The article is more apt for SaaS "clouds" such as Salesforce or AWS. The author doesn't appear to indicate cloud providers should be mandated to prevent data lock in, just that customers should be aware of the data lock in of most cloud services.

Re:Simple

[Esteanil]

But you can't make it redundant, back it up, give it high-bandwidth connectiontivity, or maintain it for that price. The hardware itself, is by far the cheapest part of any server room.

Nor can you with a single out-of-the-box Amazon EC2 instance. Your instance fails more often than a physical server, due to the nature of virtualization. (One hardware bug = many instances fail)

True, there are crisis management tools, and you can have several instances and just fire up a new one whenever the old one fails.
But then you still have the issues of corrupt data, etc - meaning you need continual backups (snapshots), meaning you need S3 space and SimpleDB access because it turns out that running an actual redundant relational DB on the cloud requires quite a bit of development and more cost than you were ready to sink...

Or third party tools, there are more of those every day, too - but *don't* think that your physical server can be simply replaced by a similar EC2 instance, or that the costs are directly translatable.

I love the cloud, though. Massively deployed virtualized/easy-access processing, storage and bandwidth is the stuff of *real* science fiction - the kind that's actually happening right now and in the next single-digit years.

It's gonna change our world and our technology in a process comparable to the introduction of widespread GSM.

I can't wait until the clouds grow up, get thick enough and start merging into the Datasphere.

Re:Simple

[Esteanil]

I think the way to move into the Cloud is simply not buying your next server.
Keep the old stuff around - the migration is going to take you some time - but you don't need to buy more hardware after a while.

And if you're quick about the migration, you could always just link the existing hardware up with some other company that's also running surplus servers from moving to the cloud, and build your own little backup cloud that you can also sell access to... Maybe even back to whichever cloud company you're running on.

I mean, this is young(ish) tech still, so there's plenty of room for more clouds in our sky. Even little ones.

Re:Simple

[DuckDodgers]

That's not a bad idea, but I see two drawbacks immediately.

First, you'll probably want all of your data in each hosting center, so if one crashes, screws up, or jacks up the prices, you don't lose anything by shutting it down. That's a form of distributed data transfer you need to manage, and it also incurs its own bandwidth and storage costs.

Second, some of the services have particular restrictions on what features they have. Google App Engine appears pretty cheap, but you can't create your own Java Threads or use a database like PostgreSQL or MySQL. If you're lucky, your application can deal with the restrictions in all of the providers you select and you can code for a data storage model they all support.

Re:Simple

[jschen]

I'm just very nervous about entrusting the company meat and potatoes to an external business.

Does your company maintain a bank account at an external institution? If so, you are already entrusting critical aspects to other businesses. It's a matter of who to trust, and with what. If a company is spending a lot of time and effort doing something--in this case, maintaining machines, but this is true of anything--then one of two things is true. Hopefully, it's because it's a core part of what the company does, i.e. its reason for being. The second possibility is that it's tying up lots of resources that might be better deployed. Put another way, outsourcing may be worthwhile even if it is the more expensive option if it allows a company to better focus on what brings home the bacon.

Re:Simple

[reashlin]

OK, So now move all your friends from one to the other...How about messages sent to/by you...How about transferring group aliases? Nup didn't think you could manage that one.

Re:Simple

[dingbatdr]

Beautifully said.

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

"Your own servers don't necessarily cost much more" ..

They do when you only need 1000 servers for a week to take the load, then can get by with the 100 servers you normally have in your production environment.

Cloud has it's purpose, it's not an end all solution for everything.

Re:Simple

[MichaelSmith]

You can export all your data from Ubuntu; it just isn't in the same format Windows wants

Ubuntu and Windows support the FAT file system. Online applications hide their file systems.

Re:Simple

[jwhitener]

Your already at the mercy of the air conditioning vendor, fire suppression vendor, electricity, internet, etc...

And if a hardware failure occurs, you are at the mercy of whatever support contract (1 hr, 4 hr, whatever.). And just like a remote vendor, you are at the mercy of your other vendors if they go out of business. I worked for a hospital with all Alpha VMS servers. Compaq bought them and phased vms out. Not much I could do about that either. Being remote doesn't make you any more or less in control.

But like you, our institution is largely hosted in house. Hundreds of servers. I think over time, we'll see many of our more standardized services being remotely hosted though. A webserver with static public content for instance. Or a mysql server being used as a backend to a company confluence wiki, etc..

What will tend to stay in house, is sensitive data, until such time as remote hosting vendors become legally obligated to protect the data. We can contract with some of them to establish trust chains, and consequences, etc.. but we've all witnessed remote host screw ups with literal or no consequences. Take gmail mixing up all those email accounts.

Until CEO/CIO's are confident that the data will be well protected, and that said vendor can be locked into privacy contracts, and that the vendor will take the fall if the data gets out... until then, most private data is going to stay on location.

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

For sure...

Although webOS on the Palm Pre is making sharing information easier between social networks, phones, notebooks, desktops, etc. I've enjoyed the ease of Palm's Synergy.

Re:Simple

[lennier]

"The author's bitch is that you don't have a one-click Export-Import function. Should you? Should Facebook or whoever be required to make the structure that they have provided for free use on their system portable?"

Yes.

I mean, if we want a sane future Net, then yes.

Money doesn't enter into it - it's a basic business-ethics question of 'do you want to treat your free customers like crap now and pen them up in a box, or treat them well and give them freedom and hope they find value in your future for-pay services?'

You might not remember this far back, but before the Web - before SMTP email left ARPANET - there was this thing called 'online services'. Big American for-pay walled gardens like Compuserve, GEnie, BIX, The Well, America Online. You logged in, you had mail, forums, news, chat... in fact you pretty much had exactly what you get in Facebook. A full online social hub, but you couldn't link outside that community to a rival service.

They did not like it when Internet email and Web came along. No sir they did not. What is this weird hippie free love thing where anyone can send email to anyone else's server? That's downright unAmerican that is! It'll never take off!

Eventually, through some miracle (which I've never understood), sanity and openness prevailed... to a point... and SMTP mail became a standard. (Sanity did not prevail long enough for SMTP to address its serious security problems, which is why we now drown in spam. There was a very very short window of accidental sanity in the early 90s.)

And the online services gave in and supported it. But it was a huge fight, and they were slow to adopt it, because they could see their captive user base falling through their fingers like sand.

And they made the same noises you're making now about how it was THEIR service and the users were free to use it or not. But that wasn't the point. The walls were making the closed networks less effective.

Facebook and Myspace and the rest of the 'social cloud' services are in EXACTLY the same position that the Online Services were in the late 80s-early 90s. Kings of the hill, for now, because of a lack of interoperability.

Keeping people locked in is a business model, yes. And yes, you can manually repost your data, multiple times, on every service you want to connect to, just as you could log into multiple BBS systems in the 80s. But that's not a sensible way to run a society or a Net.

One would think we might learn. But the commercial incentives never have really been in favour of freedom, just of efficient profit extraction. It's really quite a fluke when every now and then a company accidentally does the right thing. Sometimes they pay dearly for it. Sometimes they make out like burglars. Either way, the user doesn't always get what they want or what they need or what would make for a well-educated, healthy society, but what a technological system driven by inscrutable self-serving ends decides to provide.

It's a miracle that the Net works as well as it does, really.

Re:Simple

[turbidostato]

"Beautifully said."

Still the implicit problem remains: *if* people do indeed value that kind of security. Which they don't.

Just for an example, the other day I read on a mail list about one asking for help because due to a server crash on a remote co-location he lost its configuration as a DNS secondary so he didn't even know which domains the server was secondary for. A short bunch of pure text files which are not only perfectly "back-upable" by, say, scp, but that are in fact better managed locally and then rsync'ed away. On the same mail list another guy was asking for some tool for his Linux-based host so he could edit his statical, HTML-only web pages on-site which, again, are not only easily backuped locally but even easier to be edited locally and then rsync'ed to the server.

If on systems that by their very nature are easy to be untangled from the server people manage to find uncomfortable ways to unprotect and tie their data to the provider, what wouldn't happen when the provider, for its own greed, makes easy for the users to lock their data with them. Well, results shows it: people will *rush* to them.

Re:Simple

[turbidostato]

"I'm just very nervous about entrusting the company meat and potatoes to an external business."

Risk management as always. Higher costs *now* versus "might be" menaces tomorrow. I don't think any manager will have any problem choosing.

"If our stuff goes down because I screwed up - and it has happened - I can try to fix it immediately."

Which amounts to what, exactly. That you will try doesn't mean you'll get it. Amazon will try too, so may be you'll get it sooner or it will be Amazon. And in the meantime you'll cost more and you'll mean a greater risk to your bussiness (not only because the bus can go over you at any moment but because they can get references from Amazon everywhere but they can't test your performance against anyone since you only work for them, so unless they are in the IT bussiness themselves, they'll know you are good at your job basically because so you say).

"If something goes wrong with my Cloud Computing setup, I am at the complete mercy of their technical staff."

Unless you are the bussiness owner, the bussiness owner will see no difference. When shit hits the fan, he will be at his technical staff's mercy on one case and at Amazon's technical staff's mercy on the other, and Amazon won't have a hard day to convince your boss that they can pay more and better technical staff that him... basically because it's true.

"And of course, I'm at the mercy of the vendor. If they decide to shut down, I have to scramble to find replacement as quickly and painlessly as possible. If they decide to raise prices, I'm looking at an instant drop in operating income or else the expense of moving to another vendor."

And if you are hit by the bus or you are offered higher pay anywhere else, your company will have to scramble to find a replacement as quickly and painlessly as possible or looking at an instant drop in operating income or else the expense of hiring and training a new replacement (maybe to find too late that their expenses skyrocket because you were one of those that don't document anything and do things in the more convoluted and unreasonable way). And since they probably have suffered from that in the past Amazon won't find too difficult to convince your boss that with them it will be different -and better, since it seem (at least "seem") more difficult that they will disappear overnight or that they will go crazy and risk losing clients in the thousands to their competitors. Hell, and even then, since that crazyness will hit your boss *and his competitors* at the same time the playground would still be leveled.

Sorrily we, in-house IT people, will have a very hard day to convince the bussiness guys we are a better deal in the bussiness terms they understand.

Re:Simple

[bsDaemon]

Well, until the FTC is federally insuring cloud computing services, I still think the bank is likely a safer place to have money than "the cloud" is to have data. Of course, if the FTC were making "federally insured" backups and whatnot, then that would still probably make the bank safer...

Re:Simple

[Odinlake]

There's playing nice and there's being jerks and there're all sorts of grays in between. I don't know where facebook is but saying that they are too much to one side doesn't neccessarily imply that you mean they should be extreemely to the other.

Anyway, I read the same sentence (about exporting data) and it made me wonder if it wouldn't be fairly straightforward to make a facebook app that does just that.. Maybe there is one allready, but my point is that if there is a demand, there is probably nothing stopping it from happening (unless fb actually are beeing jerks in ways I don't know).

Re:Simple

[bloodhawk]

considering hotmail has for a long time provided a simple button called EXPORT, I am betting the Random-User-Guy with contacts in hotmail is going to have a MUCH easier time of it.

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

You are correct, but in one sentence: schema != data.

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

ICOPS - Indeterminate Collection of Other Peoples Servers

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe that the song references colitas (coal-ee-tas), not colitis (coal-ai-tis). I realize that I'm over-analyzing a perfectly good joke about a typo, but I couldn't help it. Colitas are actually rather pretty.

Re:Simple

[ShieldW0lf]

I believe its against their policy.

Re:Simple

[GPLHost-Thomas]

That's a totally wrong calculation. Amazon is more expensive than any other hosting service.

For 2000 USD/year, we provide a full core i7, RAID and 8GB only for yourself. And we are far from being the cheapest. Now, about scalability, this doesn't work either. If your service is succesful, explain to me why exacly your will need to add another instance in the minute? That's not needed in 99.9% of the cases. In reality, even waiting for a week or 2 for adding a new server is acceptable for most. And exactly why would you need to add or remove servers every day, or be billed by the hour? That doesn't make sense either for most, unless you are doing event based hosted content, and have enough engineering to deploy fast. The later is far from trivial and will make it costly to use such per-hour service.

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

If our power or internet connectivity goes down, I am at the complete mercy of their technical staff. Instead of actively working to solve the problem, all I can do is stay on the phone with their tech support and hope they fix it. If something goes wrong with my Cloud Computing setup, I can work with the corresponding vendor to get it restored.

Re:Simple

[Bigjeff5]

We still have VMS servers in operation, and we can't get rid of them. Damn things are critical to the business and it would mean replacing whole process controls systems (hundreds of millions of dollars) to replace the frickin things. It's a pain in the ass because we only have a couple people left who knows how to troubleshoot them.

This whole notion of cloud computing is completely irrelevant for me though, so meh.

Re:Simple

[Bigjeff5]

JUICHE! I think it means '42' in North Korea.

Actually it means "11" in Japan.

Mar Hoon Dool is "42" in North Korea.

Re:Simple

[binaryspiral]

To some folks, having their data hosted in a facility that handles Amazon's data is worth the price.

Re:Simple

[Just Some Guy]

That whole "meter" thing kicked your butt in high school, didn't it?

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly! My data stays on MY system where I have complete control over it, and who gets to see it! Cloud computing is irrelevant...my data will NOT be assimilated!!!

Re:Simple

[geschild]

And the simple truth is that you should be nervous. The cloud has distinct advantages that are being overshadowed by large disadvantages: the 'Next Big Lock-in (tm)'.

Basically this is the same thing 'our' community has been saying for years now: it's all about Open standards, Open document formats and Open API's. In classic style, the blogger either fails to see this point clearly or fails to clearly point this out. Your pick :).

Nicolas Barcet, the Ubuntu Server product manager at Canonical, held a talk at the Open World Forum in Paris last week. He explained how Canonical is putting its support behind Project Eucalyptus because they see an Open implementation of Amazon's API's as the way to force an Open standard for cloud computing. I think they may have a point.

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Cloud computing is eerily like the music industry, more news at 11!

Just remember, cloud computing is stealing, the Hardware Industry Association of America (HIAA) will come down hard on you.

Re:Simple

[slim]

Still the implicit problem remains: *if* people do indeed value that kind of security. Which they don't.

If consumers don't care about it, then it's not a problem.

The problem comes when they discover they care about it, too late. Compare with DRM, and the iTunes customer who's perfectly satisfied, until he buys a new non-Apple MP3 player.

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

"Relax," said the doorman, "We are programmed to receive".

Re:Simple

[Cigarra]

Actually, you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave ;-)

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

I wasn't a big fan of this route but we're starting to experiment with it.. One way you can get some sort of security is actually going the VMroute.. amazon, hpflex allows you to create VM's (tied to dedicated cores/cpus) that can be moved around at will. This allows you to move your machines to where ever you want.. (even your own machines if you will). That VM route is kind of an interesting idea even if you are local actually. If you look at the numbers its certainly more expensive on a raw machine basis than maintaining a 24/7 CPU loaded machine. (I think if you use a machine 24/7 for 6 month+ and are paying for software VM maintenance anyway its a bit of a wash)..

But it does move the server space / AC / backup issues to someone else and it also allows you to rent CPU time on a dynamical basis. If you need to farm out 2000 CPU's for a certain calculation a few times a year for example this becomes really attractive as an example. If backup / cooling / AC / redundancy isn't your forte this is a cheapish alternative..

Re:Simple

[virg_mattes]

> Compare with DRM, and the iTunes customer who's perfectly satisfied, until he buys a new non-Apple MP3 player.

You've got a flaw in comparison here, in that a Facebook user (or MySpace or whatever) provides all of their own content. The stuff you upload is your stuff to begin with, so it doesn't directly compare to DRMed songs because you presumably have access to the original content. You're only "locked in" in the sense of the data layout itself. Someone who buys a non-Apple player loses access to iTunes stuff they can't get back without rebuying it, but if Facebook went dark you'd still have your images and text, unless you uploaded them and then destroyed the originals. In fact, if you uploaded pictures or text and then did destroy the originals, you could get them back by logging into your Facebook account and downloading them back to your machine, and you could capture any comments or stuff that doesn't have an "original" just by loading the page and then saving the text (or the whole page) to a local file.

The fact is, you could replicate your Facebook page on MySpace by uploading the same content and manually retyping comments and such, so what you're complaining about is that these sites aren't providing free conversion services for you to save you the time involved in manually building a replication. I don't see any reason why these sites should be busting out software to make conversion easier for free, and (as evidenced by the absences) neither do they.

Virg

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Got To Backup Though

Re:Simple

[virg_mattes]

> So the Insightful comment here is bascially that there is no such thing as data lock in? After all, you can always recreate the data you put in. It's not like these services make it up...

His point is that the data lock-in isn't a designed in thing, it's just the nature of providing the service. More importantly, it's not impossible to get one's data back out, it just doesn't come out in a format that's simple to convert. There's nothing preventing anyone from writing an application that can export data from a cloud. Taking the article's example of Facebook, one could easily put together an app that would crawl a user's account (and could even crawl it administratively if given proper credentials) to pull out all of the information there and then write it in neatly organized files that would be ready to pass to some other cloud. What some of the commenters have been lamenting is that (in our example) Facebook isn't building such an application.

> Sorry, but that's a bit like saying "Microsoft Word documents aren't proprietary, you could always re-type the same thing in Open Office!".

It's exactly the same thing, which is why you don't see file conversion abilities in Microsoft Word. What motivation does Microsoft have to provide an easy way to convert to another program? What motivation does Facebook have to write software to allow export of their data (other than as browser pages, which is the point of the service)? For that matter, what motivation does Salesforce have to provide an easy export? As I said above, there's nothing preventing you (in general) from writing an export processor for whatever cloud you use, and I see that as a task for the one needing the export. After all, even Word documents don't obfuscate the text to the point where you can't get it back by any means.

> The author doesn't appear to indicate cloud providers should be mandated to prevent data lock in, just that customers should be aware of the data lock in of most cloud services.

I agree that the author didn't complain about the companies not providing export services, but as above I don't see the data as "locked in" in the sense of a DRM-laden program like iTunes or the like. The cloud will give back virtually everything you put into it in most cases, if asked in the right way.

Virg

Re:Simple

[mcgrew]

So data checks in but doesn't check out?

You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. Welcome to the Hotel California! Such a lovely place...

Odd that song should figure in a journal called Nothing But Trouble, which is what you'll have if you want to migrate.

Re:Simple

[Whispers_in_the_dark]

Ah, but can you turn up a bit more power in a matter of minutes not days?

One tricky part with managing the hosted hardware is figuring out how much you need. The beauty of cloud is that you don't need that calculation to produce a highly robust website. You _do_ need to still calculate and estimate costs, but if one uses reasonable worst cases one ends up with a model that's very close to normal hosting in price.

The difference is the disaster recovery, not the price (which you have to build into your software stack too!)

Re:Simple

[slim]

All that is true - you're looking for a more direct analogy than I intended.

The similarity is that in both cases, the feature (exportability of content in the case of Facebook; absence of DRM in the case of iTunes) is something that a typical non-technical punter doesn't know they want, until they need it.

Hence, it's not a factor they consider when choosing a service -- at least, not the first time they choose a service. And hence we can't expect market forces to lead companies to provide these things.

In the case of iTunes, of course, consumers became more aware of the issues, and Apple had to provide.

Re:Simple

[virg_mattes]

> Hence, it's not a factor they consider when choosing a service -- at least, not the first time they choose a service. And hence we can't expect market forces to lead companies to provide these things.

The market can indeed drive companies to provide it, since not everyone discovers they need it at the same time (so person A could discover the need before person B even signs on, and then person B finds out when the company tells him that it's available) and the market can drive third-party solutions that would then become available external to the company.

Virg

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

You down with opb, ya you know me

Is Yahoo! the Facebook of webmail?

[BitHive]

I can't transfer my yahoo to my twitter, this cloud computing has gone wild.

Re:Is Yahoo! the Facebook of webmail?

[Jesus_666]

No, but I do think that Slashdot is the JVC of hypertext.

Re:Is Yahoo! the Facebook of webmail?

[mcgrew]

I can't transfer my yahoo to my twitter, this cloud computing has gone wild.

That would be like transferring your slashdot journal to your sig, woudn't it? Of course, some journals I've seen would fit...

Universal Database

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.maya.com/file_download/35/maya_universal_database.pdf

Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

If you mean a big hit that everyone knows.

Re:Yes

[eldavojohn]

If you mean a big hit that everyone knows.

I don't think that's what they meant by turning Hotel California into an adjective or analogy.

I believe the one-way street attribute would probably be the easiest way to describe it. Although there's more subtle caveats to 'Hotel California' as a lyrical work. Though interpretations have been numerous (I've heard it compared to prison), the writers describe it as an allegory about hedonism and self-destruction in Southern California--especially the music industry (that we all know and love). From the Wikipedia entry:

"Don Henley and Glenn wrote most of the words. All of us kind of drove into LA at night. Nobody was from California, and if you drive into LA at night... you can just see this glow on the horizon of lights, and the images that start running through your head of Hollywood and all the dreams that you have, and so it was kind of about that... what we started writing the song about. Coming into LA... and from that Life In The Fast Lane came out of it, and Wasted Time and a bunch of other songs."

So if I may elaborate the analogy may be trying to describe cloud computing as something you're kind of forced into and it would seem stupid not to take it ... but then you start to realize that it's not everything it was made out to be at the beginning. You are promised success and all the resources imaginary but then at the end when you realize you don't have control over the situation and your data or privacy becomes seriously important to you, it's nowhere to be found and irreclaimable. The song's final lyrics before the guitar solo and double stop bass: "You can checkout any time you like/But you can never leave."

No, this isn't unique, Lynyrd Skynyrd felt the same way as did The Kinks and I bet if I sat and thought I'd come up with much much more. I guess you'd be better off explaining it outright than calling cloud computing Hotel California but the English language allows one to play and invent I guess. The author might consider the younger crowds though for this piece.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

While all of this is true I think you took the reference a little far. They most likely just meant a small bit of the song.

"You can checkout any time you like, but you can never leave."

Re:Yes

[MickyTheIdiot]

No. You have to wait for a long guitar solo to finish before you can look at your address book.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

The author might consider the younger crowds though for this piece.

"I've had a rough night, and I hate the fucking Eagles, man!" - The Dude.

Re:Yes

[religious freak]

Hotel California was the last time I ever looked at interpretation from an artist of their lyrics. It really does ruin the song in a sense, because I always thought it meant something different.

In reality it doesn't matter what the artist meant when they wrote the lyrics, it just matters what the lyrics mean to you, but still... hearing what they intended when they wrote the song takes some of the meaning away from the lyrics.

Re:Yes

[ChefInnocent]

I figured they were talking about "Warm smell of colitas" to mean that Could computing stinks like *ss.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

In reality it doesn't matter what the artist meant when they wrote the lyrics, it just matters what the lyrics mean to you, but still... hearing what they intended when they wrote the song takes some of the meaning away from the lyrics.

Unless you're incapable of understanding multiple viewpoints of one thing, no it does not take away any meaning.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

It also bears mentioning that one popular interpretation is that the hotel in the lyrics is an elaborate metaphor for an insane asylum, from the perspective of one of its patients. This is pretty much certainly a myth, though, as evidenced by the parent's quotes among other things.

Re:Yes

[rockNme2349]

No kidding. Now that I know he was singing about Cloud computing it's a total downer.

Re:Yes

[TobyRush]

I wonder why there is so much confusion about the Eagles reference? Maybe a mid-1970's tune is just a little outside the average slashdotter's frame of reference.

Perhaps if the submitter cast Cloud Computing as the "Take On Me" of tech, where your data is sucked into this weird comic book world, and if you can get it out it's all dirty and disheveled in the trash can behind the counter?

Re:Yes

[Jesus_666]

True, even though this went horribly wrong at one point when Charles Manson misinterpreted a term for "playground slide" as "apocalyptic war". Granted, the man was quite insane to begin with but it still serves as an illustration that someone's interpretation of a song can radically differ from the one intended.

Another example would be the Deutschlandlied. The first stanza begins with "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles" ("Germany, Germany above all"). Ever since a psychopathic Austrian painter took over the country people tend to misinterpret it as "Germany should be above all other countries". That's actually wrong; when the song was written Germany was an area containing several dozen small countries all sharing one language and (mostly) culture. The song expresses the desire to get rid of the borders and just have one German country - or, in short, the desire for Germany to exist. Of course that didnt keep the brownshirts from coopting it.

Literary figures (and similar symbolism in other forms of art) are always a difficult thing - they heavily rely on the audience knowing certain things or having certain opinions. Thus, someone who has never been to the UK will have a harder time grasping the symbolism of Helter Skelter. Someone from today might interpret a particular still life as nothing but a depiction of a fruit basket even though back when it was made the numerous symbols for death would've been readily apparent to everyone. And few people outside Germany would see any special connotations in the remark "nobody intends to build a wall".

Symbolism is a clever way to convey a message. Unfortunately it's also a fairly noisy one and it's not always easy to detect which symbols are the most robust.

Re:Yes

[Bigjeff5]

"Colitas" refers to Colita de Rata, also known as Antelope sage. Warm smells are pleasant smells, and the reference was in the part of the song talking about how irresistably inviting California is at first.

They may have been talking about pot, but it seems like a stretch.

Apples and Oranges

[spribyl]

Facebook and MySpace are not computing clouds they are applications

The google and amazon clouds are not applications(sort of). You can always move your data from one cloud to an other just back it up and restore it.

I would not expect to move cloud configuration from one cloud to another. That would be like moving from Windows to Linux, or Solaris to HP, they may be similar but work using different mechanisms.

Steve

Re:Apples and Oranges

[milgr]

According to wikipedia, Facebook and MySpace are cloud applications. On the other hand, I usually just consider them web applications.

I usually think of Cloud Computing in terms of places to run virtual machines - Like Amazon's EC2, or a private cloud. There should be no problem getting data off of a cloud infrastructure.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[Galestar]

"According to wikipedia [wikipedia.org], Facebook and MySpace are cloud applications" Could you please back that claim up with, say, an actual quote from that article saying that facebook and myspace are cloud applications? Text-based search does not reveal either "facebook" or "myspace" at all in that article. Also, checking history since before your comment doesn't reveal anyone deleting said words.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[falconwolf]

I would not expect to move cloud configuration from one cloud to another.

If, I wanted to use cloud computing services I'd definitely want to have my data portable, I wouldn't want to be stuck with a service I hated.

Then again I wouldn't want to use another's system anyway, cloud computing, online data storage, or software as a service. I find it almost ironic we're going full circle. We started out with centralized computing (mainframes), along came Personal Computers (PCs), now we're moving back to centralized computers and services.

That would be like moving from Windows to Linux, or Solaris to HP, they may be similar but work using different mechanisms.

I and others do the same now. I'm typing this on my MacBook Pro running Leopard, but SRN I'll upgrade to Snow Leopard (SL). I already have the upgrade disk. After I install SL I'll also install Ubuntu. When I do I'll setup Snow Leopard and Ubuntu to use the same user home, including the data stores. The bookmarks, history, and preferences in Firefox in SL will be the same as they are in Firefox running in Ubuntu. The problem I'm having is how to preserve the OS X HFS+ metadata when using Ubuntu.

If I wanted to use MS Windows also I could do the same with it. That is a BIG IF though, I switched from Windows to Linux and OS X and don't want to go back.

Falcon

Re:Apples and Oranges

[stephanruby]

According to wikipedia [wikipedia.org], Facebook and MySpace are cloud applications.

The owner of a cloud application may own his very *own* computing platform, that's true. But in the case where both owners are not the same, the one who owns the computing platform is not necessarily responsible for everything the application creator did/does on it.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[Swanktastic]

@MILGR, OH SNAP!

Re:Apples and Oranges

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, the term "oh snap" does not appear in the Wikipedia article referenced.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[Zontar The Mindless]

It doesn't appear in this one, either.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[milgr]

OK, the article doesn't list Facebook and MySpace as cloud applications, but it does list Twitter and Google apps. I just generalized it a bit.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[g0at]

I usually think of "cloud applications" as "rain".

-b

Re:Apples and Oranges

[Anonymous Coward]

"I find it almost ironic we're going full circle. We started out with centralized computing (mainframes)"

You are on the path, but still not there. Your comparation is even more pointed in: we started with *rented* centralized computers (you didn't buy them from IBM, you rented them along with support services), and again people is renting iron and supporting services to anyone else.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[slim]

OK, the article doesn't list Facebook and MySpace as cloud applications, but it does list Twitter and Google apps. I just generalized it a bit.

By direct analogy, the Wikipedia article on word processors doesn't mention Excel or 123, but it does list Word and WordPerfect. Amazing.

Re:Apples and Oranges

[Galestar]

And oh snap in that context doesn't have a wikipedia article either: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh_snap It must not be real...

Least Common Denominator

[Archangel Michael]

I tend to save things in LCD format, txt or RTF for Documents, tab delimited for tables, JPG or GIF for images (or PNG), MP3 for music etc.

The point being, if you save data in a format that is limited (.doc, .xls, .raw, etc) you're going to have difficulty moving it around.

And stuff that has to be saved in a proprietary format gets a simpler version, that may be missing things (formulas, charts), so that I can move them to a new system should the need arise. I used to use Dataviz to convert stuff, but found it was just easier to re-create the things I need rather than trying to clean up the splash of translation.

It is also makes it easier to learn a "new" setup if you have to use it to set the things up you need, rather than letting something automate it.

The point is, you don't need to worry about data portability if you plan for it.

Re:Least Common Denominator

[falconwolf]

if you save data in a format that is limited (.doc, .xls, .raw, etc) you're going to have difficulty moving it around.

...

The point is, you don't need to worry about data portability if you plan for it.

Are there common data file formats for databases? Say if I'm using MySQL or PostgreSQL but switch to Firebird or Oracle, can I easily move my data too? Or will I have to go through a hassle converting the formats?

Falcon

Re:Least Common Denominator

[Akido37]

if you save data in a format that is limited (.doc, .xls, .raw, etc) you're going to have difficulty moving it around.

...

The point is, you don't need to worry about data portability if you plan for it.

Are there common data file formats for databases? Say if I'm using MySQL or PostgreSQL but switch to Firebird or Oracle, can I easily move my data too? Or will I have to go through a hassle converting the formats?

Falcon

Sadly, I must say CSV. But, just because you CAN do something, doesn't mean you SHOULD.

Re:Least Common Denominator

[Anonymous Coward]

Are there common data file formats for databases?

Yes. .csv files. (usually .csv.gz) All our ``data'' is in those, and we've never had problems loading it into any database. And yes, we do have terabytes of new data to deal with on a daily basis.

We never bother with database backup utilities since aren't portable at all and often not even between different versions of the db software. Just dump .csv data out, and store that.

Re:Least Common Denominator

[falconwolf]

Are there common data file formats for databases? Say if I'm using MySQL or PostgreSQL but switch to Firebird or Oracle, can I easily move my data too? Or will I have to go through a hassle converting the formats?

Sadly, I must say CSV

Okay.

But, just because you CAN do something, doesn't mean you SHOULD.

I agree. One of the things I want to do, in starting a photography business, is create a database with tables for clients, agreements, orders, and photos among other things. There will be many-to-many relationships but with associative tables they can be normalized, how does CSV handle that? Or say take individual photos, a single photo can have more than one value for the keyword "subject". There's a lake and park near me with a path around the lake, which people including me bike, run, skate, and walk on that's more than 4 miles long (well I haven't run it but I've done the others). In cold and warm weather I've taken photos of people on their wind surfers on the lake. In warm weather there are sailboats in the lake and during winter skaters are ice skating. Now when I've scanned my film, yes I still shoot film, I want to create a database of the photos including subject matter, the fstop and aperture, and the lens used among other data. Day and date, tyme of day, film used, location and such. And it gets more complicated when I start shooting the stars, I have a telescope and the mount I need the mount my camera to it as well as software for tracking I just need to find a dark place to go to to shoot the stars. I use E6 slide film now but for astrophotography I'll want to try Black and White as well as infrared film.

I just don't known how easy it will be to use CSV for that if I switch Database Management Systems.

Falcon

Re:Least Common Denominator

[Archangel Michael]

If you switch DBMS you're gonna have other problems. Extracting all the info out of one, and inserting it into another is an exercise in hair pulling. If you've ever been part of a DBMS conversion project, getting tables lined up and managed properly is the biggest part of the problem. Getting the system to function after that is usually a piece of cake in comparison.

Re:Least Common Denominator

[Killeryugi]

That could be awesome if automated. Think about it: ctrl-s, .docx goes to C:\, RTF goes to an external drive. You get a automatic "backup" that you can plug into any computer and be able to work with.

Re:Least Common Denominator

[turbidostato]

"Are there common data file formats for databases?
Yes. .csv files. [...] We never bother with database backup utilities since aren't portable at all and often not even between different versions of the db software. Just dump .csv data out, and store that."

That doesn't mean csv is the answer to the question, it just mean your ignorance gets to the point to take spreadsheets for databases.

Private clouds are more interesting...

[otis wildflower]

... And with all the complaining about 'proprietary' clouds, why not build your own?

To my mind, the useful cloud is basically clustering plus virtualization, minus expensive licenses (if you use Ubuntu Server, Fedora or other OSS 'cloud' components).. And IIRC you can 'pickle' a cloud instance and run it on EC2, though I'm not sure if you'd be able to do the reverse..

(I wonder if there's a market in rent-an-instance using open tools and providing 2-way VM access..)

Re:Private clouds are more interesting...

[FlyingBishop]

The useful cloud is what I can hand to my mother and allow her to publish a webpage as easily as I could with a bit of CGI. Though open-source CMS's like Drupal do offer some of that, they still face the wall at the edge of your webspace where friends cannot easily integrate their content with mine. Social networks really do offer a great deal, but the lock-in is killer.

As for SaaS, yeah, that's nothing new.

Google or EC2 a "closed data service?"

[Concern]

Can someone give a little depth to the vague and unsubstantiated comment in TFA, referencing i.e. google: "...with closed data networks making it difficult to impossible to move data into competing services."

So which is it? Difficult or impossible? Or both?

I'm not at all surprised that facebook or myspace are not jumping up and down to allow various kinds of data export. But the fact that these obstacles are conflated with google and EC2 policies in the same paragraph without giving any details whatsoever makes it tough to take this post very seriously.

What would stop you from taking your data out of the cloud? SFTP not allowed? Can't access Mysql DB from outside? I'm asking honestly - I'd love to know.

Re:Google or EC2 a "closed data service?"

[uberedit]

Clearly Asay doesn't know about Google's internal team specifically working on ways to get your data out of the cloud. http://www.dataliberation.org/home specifically details what data you can pull from each of Google's services and how to do it. They concede they haven't "liberated" all the data from every service, but they're working on it.

Re:Google or EC2 a "closed data service?"

[Anonymous Coward]

Join the Data Liberation Front! Throw off your shackles! Data wants to be free!

Re:Google or EC2 a "closed data service?"

[amicusNYCL]

Uh, yeah.. maybe your data wants to be free, but my data is staying right the hell on my computer, where it belongs.

Re:Google or EC2 a "closed data service?"

[Anonymous Coward]

The cloud runs on iTunes.

Re:Google or EC2 a "closed data service?"

[gehrehmee]

The problem comes in when providers are offering Sofware-as-a-service services. In these systems, your data is locked up somewhere with no simple way to get it out. Think Facebook or Myspace. (Google is working on some common methods to get things in and out of such systems... but for a company like Facebook, it's generally in their best interests to make it hard to get out)

Something like Amazon EC2 (or S3), in contrast, is really about providing application-agnostic resources, like a virtual disk. You put you data there, you run a database there, you run applications there. The system doesn't care what you're doing, because all it has to do is provide what looks like a standard computer (virtualized). In this case, it's easy to move things around as you like, because you control the application AND the data.

I don't exactly know where Google's services like AppEngine fall... I'd love to hear more opinions here...

Re:Google or EC2 a "closed data service?"

[Anonymous Coward]

As a member of the Front for Data Liberation, if there's on thing I hate more than shackled data, it is the Data Liberation Front.

Re:Google or EC2 a "closed data service?"

[slack_justyb]

What would stop you from taking your data out of the cloud? SFTP not allowed? Can't access Mysql DB from outside? I'm asking honestly - I'd love to know.

I agree, this whole article sounds like an end user rant. There is nothing to prevent one from using the available Facebook Web services to move data to whatever it is that you want to move it to say like MySpace. The problem being the marshalling and unmarshalling of data between services. If you really feel that it is a bad rub, then push for a standard in Social Networking protocols using whatever happy technology you want.

I really think that the guy is bitching that when you put data up on the "cloud" that in order for someone else to actually see it they too must sign-up for the service (aka, it's not open to people who haven't signed up.) There again, I think the guy is mostly focusing on why can't someone put something on MySpace or Facebook and not have to have an account to see the content (much like YouTube I guess.) I don't know but I've never seen a problem with moving data in and out of Google or EC2, but there again I'm a developer so the end-user may be looking at this whole thing differently. The whole thing is incredibly interesting because in order to place a comment you have to sign-up and give out your email address.

Re:Google or EC2 a "closed data service?"

[hedwards]

And that's the only reason why I'm willing to let them hold any of my data. I regularly back my email and such up to my local disk where it gets backed up to a different remote server. Given that data loss incident they had a couple years back, I'm not sure that I'm willing to trust them to have proper backups. But OTOH that recent incident with the judge ordering an account blocked without cause is another reason to be wary of cloud service that doesn't allow backups of some sort to ones own computer.

Re:Google or EC2 a "closed data service?"

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you follow the link?

Re:Google or EC2 a "closed data service?"

[turbidostato]

"As a member of the Front for Data Liberation"

You!!!??? Our damn enemy!!!??? We are the Data Liberation Front, you unsensitive clod!

It's really all the same anyway...

[gimmebeer]

All the same stupid jokes, surveys and hoaxes are posted endlessly on all social networks. They each hook into the same Zynga games to keep the masses entertained... eventually it will be discovered that all the back-end data is identical and each network is simply a different interface to Skynet. Sadly, by then it will be too late.

Re:It's really all the same anyway...

[Anonymous Coward]

I was able to read your mind there for a second. Your tin-foil hat must have a hole in it.

Re:It's really all the same anyway...

[hedwards]

I was worried about Skynet, then I found this site with these funny felines that say silly baby talkish things and became less concerned. Clearly we don't have to worry until they get bored with that.

First, define cloud computing

[jhfry]

As I understand it, cloud computing can be a cloud application, like google. Or you can actually run your own servers in the cloud, to which you would have complete control of the data and could dump it at will.

Of course using Software as a Service will lock you in... even if there aren't nefarious reasons behind it. But if your going to provision several cloud server instances, load Redhat on them, and put everything in mysql... then your free to do what you will with your data.

Software as a Service Cloud Computing. If anything SAS is just a small segment of the Cloud Computing movement.

Re:First, define cloud computing

[knarf]

Or you can actually run your own servers in the cloud

Of course that is what you should do. It is also what just about everyone has been doing before some marketdroid caught a whiff of the 'cloud' and the current cloud-craze started. Just call it the net and be done with it.

Webservers, mailservers, database servers, groupware servers, terminal servers, fileservers... all attach to a network... which can be connected to the internet... which on the whiteboard is drawn as a cloud...

Yuck. They should have drawn it as a bucket of snot instead, see what the marketfolk would have done with that.

Facebook/Myspace != cloud computing

[Red Flayer]

In the masters chamber
They gather for the feast
They stab it with their steely knives
But the just can't kill the beast.

I didn't think MS did cloud computing?

Besides, when you say "cloud computing", about the last thing that would become likely would be "the warm smell of coitus".

So, no. Cloud Computing is not the Hotel California.

Maybe the Hot(el) (C)oral (Es)sex, but definitely not the Hotel California.

Seriously, though... Matt Asay is comparing cloud computing to Facebook/Myspace data? Very, very different beasts.

Re:Facebook/Myspace != cloud computing

[Shining Celebi]

Besides, when you say "cloud computing", about the last thing that would become likely would be "the warm smell of coitus".

It's the warm smell of colitas, a plant, not of coitus. ;)

Re:Facebook/Myspace != cloud computing

[Anonymous Coward]

Mostly agreed; except that the song says "colitas", not coitus.

As I understand it, that was the result of a mis-translation (by the songwriter) of the Spanish word for marijuana.

Re:Facebook/Myspace != cloud computing

[Vovk]

Parent is correct, but kinda moved off the point.

Social Networking != Cloud Computing

Yes you can run some applications from facebook's/myspace's severs, but they are hardly the scale you'd need for say, a cloud based OS.

Until I can store/edit documents, compile code, host my own virtual server, run complex applications (GIMP, Blender Publisher) and basically do everything else that I use a computer for from what is basically a thin client connected to a gigantic central cluster, then it isn't cloud computing.

Though to be honest, I don't think I'd want to. Something about controlling my own hardware is appealing to me ;)

About social networking being "hotel california"... WTF? "I can't transfer my info from myspace to facebook easily, so it must be lockin!" I'm sorry but that argument makes almost no sense. These are separate sites running on their own systems, they have their own way of communicating. Maybe if you can write a program to transfer data from one to the other, you could release it and solve this problem :) But the sites aren't trying to block each other out.

About the concept of cloud computing being "hotel california"... Maybe. IF MS and Apple come out with cloud computing solutions, I assure you that they will be subscription based. If you want more features, you WILL pay a higher premium. And they will be orchestrated to stop you from using the other system, even though the hardware that you'd be using to connect to the cloud would be almost identical in both cases (A monitor, Mouse, Keyboard, and computer with just enough horsepower to run SSH)

Who knows though! Perhaps cloud computing will spawn the year of the linux desktop! Think about it, free servers run by philanthropists, serving people the content they want for a fraction of the price of running your own box! /sarcasm

In reality, MS and Apple will continue to do their best to keep linux under the public radar, a good deal of people will still own their own computers, but will probably use very lightweight cloud based laptops to do work portably. These people will pay high premiums for their right to use the system, while Linux/BSD/Solaris/Haiku users will have the same laptops running off of their own personal servers. Normal people's privacy will be marginalized and the large companies will have more control over most people's lives. And the cycle will continue...

Re:Facebook/Myspace != cloud computing

[mick88]

Even though your MS comment was humorous, the reality is that MS actually is in the cloud computing business: http://www.microsoft.com/online/default.mspx

It's becoming a huge part of MS's strategy. And as someone who works with customers to move to cloud services, I can also confirm that it is much easier to move your data to the cloud (both to MS and Google's clouds) than it is to move the data back. There are ways to move data back out, but most of what I've seen / used have been manual. For example - you can always export your Outlook data to a PST and re-import it to an Exchange mailbox. So it's possible, but not pretty.

Re:Facebook/Myspace != cloud computing

[falconwolf]

Seriously, though... Matt Asay is comparing cloud computing to Facebook/Myspace data? Very, very different beasts.

It's different until you try to move Facebook or MySpace data to another platform. The data isn't that portable, which I think the writer tried to get across.

Falcon

Re:Facebook/Myspace != cloud computing

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, 'colitas' in the song is referring to cannabis, so it could be at least slightly related to 'cloud computing'...

Re:Facebook/Myspace != cloud computing

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

y would be "the warm smell of coitus".

Let me guess, you also sing along with "Excuse me while I kiss this guy" and maybe "the girl with colitis goes by."?

The term "colitas" in the first stanza of the song is a desert flower, also known as Antelope sage or Colita de Rata [9]. Both Don Henley and Don Felder have repeatedly and publicly stated that Colitas are "heady desert flowers."[citation needed] Others assert that "colitas" is a Spanish term for "little tails" or "little bottoms", and a reference to the buds of the Cannabis plant.[10]

Why not Roach Motel?

[travdaddy]

I guess the Roach Motel of Tech implies bad things about your data.

Re:Why not Roach Motel?

[NoYob]

I guess the Roach Motel of Tech implies bad things about your data.

It'll survive a nuclear holocaust?

Re:Why not Roach Motel?

[maxwell demon]

It will move everywhere where you don't want it to be?

Why on earth would they do that

[rehtonAesoohC]

Ever tried getting your Facebook data into, say, MySpace? Good luck with that.

From the "but-you-can-never-leave dept?" More like from the "no-shit-sherlock" dept... Why on earth would a company allow customers to automatically populate another company's website with your data? What I've found with social media sites is that if you invest so much time into inserting your data into their site, you are going to be much less inclined to go to the same thing again and again on other websites. Even if you don't like the interface as much as you may like some other site, you may feel a bit lazy and stick around. Whereas if the company said "here you go, click this button to transfer your profile to !" people would be jumping ship all over the place and it would be much more difficult to retain customers.

Re:Why on earth would they do that

[vertinox]

That I've found with social media sites is that if you invest so much time into inserting your data into their site, you are going to be much less inclined to go to the same thing again and again on other websites.

Ermm.... I disagree. I know plenty of people that have duplicate social media pages that are basically mirrors on Facebook, Livejournal, Myspace, and Twitter.

There are software tools out there that simply update all of them at once, but I'm not sure if that is either here nor there about your argument.

It is just that people do run multiple social networking pages at once simply with the right tools.

Even so... Its not that hard to re-upload your pictures again or retype in your information. Its not like a 500 page novel. People aren't just that interesting. ;)

Re:Why on earth would they do that

[Ephemeriis]

Ever tried getting your Facebook data into, say, MySpace? Good luck with that.

From the "but-you-can-never-leave dept?" More like from the "no-shit-sherlock" dept... Why on earth would a company allow customers to automatically populate another company's website with your data? What I've found with social media sites is that if you invest so much time into inserting your data into their site, you are going to be much less inclined to go to the same thing again and again on other websites. Even if you don't like the interface as much as you may like some other site, you may feel a bit lazy and stick around. Whereas if the company said "here you go, click this button to transfer your profile to !" people would be jumping ship all over the place and it would be much more difficult to retain customers.

I'm having a hard time even understanding what would move from Facebook into MySpace.

Are they just talking about moving your friends over? Wouldn't that be as simple as doing a screendump of your friends on Facebook, and then inviting them all on MySpace? Are they complaining that there's no automated way to do this?

Are they talking about moving your wall/posts/whatever over? Isn't there an API that lets you view a lot of that stuff from a client? Couldn't you use that API to pull that information into a file on your computer and then just copy & paste it onto MySpace?

It isn't like Facebook is somehow holding your personal information hostage or anything... You typed it in there to start with.

There might not be much point in switching from Facebook to MySpace if your friends don't use it... You'd have to completely rebuild your social network... But that isn't really Facebook's fault, now is it?

I guess I'm just not seeing the lock-in here.

Re:Why on earth would they do that

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Why on earth would a company allow customers to automatically populate another company's website with your data?

And while we're at it:

Why would a company that's so paranoid about their proprietary information that they won't use a wireless microphone in a meeting:

  - Hire an external company to convert the "nerd lunch" lectures, which walk employees through the IP crown jewels, to convert the videotapes of the lectures to online format for the internal website (rather than buying an appliance or configuring a linux box to do it in-house),

  - Hire an outside service to do online videoconferencing,

  - Hire a division of ONE OF THEIR COMPETITORS to run their internal IT infrastructure.

  - Force the linux users of the acquisition they just paid a couple billion for onto Vista (for security),

  - Force all employees to take a mandatory intellectual-property security-training web-based presentation that only runs under Internet Explorer (if you want to get credited for passing it) and asks you to input your password so it can check it for quality,

just for starters.

But then I think back to the office politics of OTHER large companies I've worked for and it all makes sense. Unfortunately.

Capitalists?

[Sockatume]

"For the capitalists, it's just like Software 1.0 all over again, with fat profits waiting to be had."

At the risk of stating the obvious, isn't the whole idea of the straw-man capitalist (as opposed to an individual in a capitalist society) that he/she treats everything as a profit opportunity? I mean, for the greedy, there are fat profits in rubber band manufacture or book binding or air fresheners, to choose three items I can see from my chair. It's necessarily not some intrinsic aspect of cloud computing/web 2.0/web 1.0/whatever.

Re:Capitalists?

[migla]

Yeah, but the rubber band makers, book binders and air freshener peddlers have a harder time accomplishing vendor lock-in.

Re:Capitalists?

[Sockatume]

Obviously. However I'm not sure why the article pointed out that those practicing vendor lock-in are trying to make money. It's kind of implicit in "vendor".

Re:Capitalists?

[Anonymous Coward]

Book binding? Fat? Profits?

Clearly you have NEVER worked in printing.

Re:Capitalists?

[scamper_22]

shhhh.

Engineers need to be slaves only working to benefit humanity.
They need not concern themselves with petty issues like earning a living, having stable employment, protecting their trade...

Let me know when society gives me a guaranteed income, and I'll write open source code and all the bruhaha that comes along with it.

Oh how I think this financial collapse will force some reality into these naive folk.

Re:Capitalists?

[jellomizer]

well... If you want that smell of air freshener then you are locked in.
In general the completive advantage is a lock in mechanism. Software tends to have a diverse set of different competitive advantages. Others sectors have less. Say Intel Processor vs. AMD processor, or Dell vs. HP, or Brand X rubber bands vs. Brand y.

However they all try to give themselves a competitive advantage.
Say Brand X rubber band has the fastest shipping then any other brands, and your business depends on that fast shipping... Then you are stuck to brand X. Depending how much need that fast shipping they may even raise their prices for their product and you will still use them, as its competitive advantage is what you need.

For some people switching from one Cloud service to an other one may not be a big deal. The way they may use it is more "cross platform" or their data is easily converted back and forth. So depending on your priorities you can be more stuck to your brand of rubber band then to your Cloud service.

Re:Capitalists?

[falconwolf]

Let me know when society gives me a guaranteed income, and I'll write open source code and all the bruhaha that comes along with it.

Oh how I think this financial collapse will force some reality into these naive folk.

Unfortunately some people want to make it worse, by for instance nationalizing health care and medicine. Open source on the other hand is capitalistic, if you define capitalism like a free market, as a voluntary exchange. If it weren't for FOSS it's unlikely you'd be using the internet. Even gated online communities used open source software.

Falcon

Re:Capitalists?

[dkf]

[Moderate or post...? Moderate or post...? Post.]

Let me know when society gives me a guaranteed income, and I'll write open source code and all the bruhaha that comes along with it.

I write open source software for entertainment, and it sure beats watching TV. It happens to be good for my career as well (yes, really) but that's not why I do it. It turns out that direct monetarization is not the only way to benefit, and in fact I derive far more benefit by not charging since if I charged, next to nobody would use it and I'd get far less out of the other ways to gain; network effects are important...

Re:Capitalists?

[lennier]

"Yeah, but the rubber band makers, book binders and air freshener peddlers have a harder time accomplishing vendor lock-in."

Ahem.

Tell that to John D Rockefeller and Thomas Edison.

Re:Capitalists?

[scamper_22]

I'm not suggesting open source is against a free market.

I'm just suggesting it is pretty stupid for most engineers and scientists to engage in as a dominant model of their trade.

Re:Capitalists?

[falconwolf]

I'm not suggesting open source is against a free market.

You may not but others have equated it with communism.

I'm just suggesting it is pretty stupid for most engineers and scientists to engage in as a dominant model of their trade.

Scientists have to, science is built on science. That is the work one scientist does depends on work scientists did before. Even Isaac Newton depended on previous scientists.

Falcon

Walled Gardens

[resistant]

I don't really have much to say on this, but what the hell, I'll say it anyway.

Walled gardens result from the natural desire of business operators to hold on to customers once they've spent a remarkable amount of money per head to get those customers. That the tactics they use, including purposeful obstruction of data migration, are often appalling is simply irrelevant. Ethics can be hard to define for such a relatively nebulous matter as data storage formats, and most people aren't all that ethical about money with which to begin, especially in a poor economy.

This situation will continue until there is a sustained and vigorous effort on the part of customers to insist that businesses use a standard, probably XML-carried, format for customer data, preferably with legal sanctions such as fines for businesses that refuse to play ball. I've thought on this sort of thing for a few years, but don't yet have a more specific proposal. One thought is to make customers the sole legal owners of their own information, with all that implies.

Ever tried ...

[mujadaddy]

Ever tried getting your Facebook data into, say, MySpace?

No, and I never tried fucking a styrofoam sheep while doing underwater welding either.

Re:Ever tried ...

[Anne Thwacks]

I never tried fucking a styrofoam sheep while doing underwater welding either.

You obviously need to get a life!

Re:Ever tried ...

[snspdaarf]

Ever tried getting your Facebook data into, say, MySpace?

No, and I never tried fucking a styrofoam sheep while doing underwater welding either.

I have so much farther to go before I can say "Now, I have seen it all" than I realized.

For the freedom-inclined among us...

[insertwackynamehere]

For the freedom-inclined among us, this is cause for concern.

HAHAHAHAHAahahahahahahahahahah excuse me


ahaahaahha oh man im so sorry i just cant stop laughing at this idiotic comment

Re:For the freedom-inclined among us...

[BitHive]

If you like that kind of crap you should start reading Ron Paul blogs :-)

Perhaps not the best analogy.

[greenguy]

Some dance to remember, some dance to forget. This is not what I look for in hardware.

Re:Perhaps not the best analogy.

[ChefInnocent]

Maybe not, but Tiffany's data may become twisted as she txts from teh b3nz.

desperate "journalism"

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the more appropriate Eagles analogy here would be "Desperado" for the writer.

The summary is so far off I didn't even follow the link. Previous posters have already stated the obvious that transferring data between social web apps has nothing to do with cloud computing

Please don't tell this is just some ass-munch blog post. pllleasee.....

Hotel California

[MickyTheIdiot]

My interpretation of "Hotel California" has always been as a particular and unusual vision of Hell.

I guess cloud computing fits in that.

They're working on it.

[Bamfarooni]

http://www.dataliberation.org/

For the non Eagles fans here

[jd2112]

The relevant lyrics are:

We are all just prisoners here, of our own device

You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave

And

They stab it with their steely knives, but they just can't kill the beast

Psshaw

[tthomas48]

Thanks to this open format known as HTML, it's not too hard to build a screen-scraper and get your data back out. Not to mention that the google and facebook APIs will help you pull quite a bit out.

Compare that to a client GUI program with no copy-and-paste capability. As someone who's done a lot of data extracation from closed systems, I'll take a terminal first, and a web client second, everything else is a distant third.

Re:Psshaw

[phyreskull]

Thanks to this open format known as HTML, it's not too hard to build a screen-scraper and get your data back out.

Ah, but you're forgetting that doing so is generally against their terms of service and can lead to your account being suspended or banned.

Re:Psshaw

[tepples]

Thanks to this open format known as HTML, it's not too hard to build a screen-scraper and get your data back out.

The TOS likely prohibits using an automated process to retrieve multiple pages that require being logged in. The site could enforce the TOS by using the same that TV listing sites and HTML spammers have used:

• changing all the ids and classes daily,
• using rowspans, colspans, and positioning tricks to reorder text,
• using images of text,
• limiting maximum page views per minute, per hour, and per day,
• using timing analysis to determine when the page access pattern is too regular,
• encrypting the pages and decrypting them with JavaScript or ActionScript, and
• other anti-bot techniques I can't think of at the moment.

wtf?

[z-j-y]

this article is total garbage. slashdot needs some new editors who has a little common sense of the things they are publishing.

Re:wtf?

[AmberBlackCat]

I agree, but I think we need to keep these people employed at Slashdot so they don't end up getting hired at the US patent office.

Re:wtf?

[ericfitz]

slashdot needs some new editors who has a little common sense of the things they are publishing.

HAHAHAHAHahahaha.... oh wait, you were serious.

Re:wtf?

[gmhowell]

No kidding. Especially that CmdrTaco guy. Who the fuck does he think he is? I wish the people who run this place would run him outta town.

Re:Your official guide to the Jigaboo presidency

[PitaBred]

Is today a holiday or something? This kind of trolling doesn't usually happen until school starts letting out...

Is there any good alternative...

[jellomizer]

The example of moving your facebook page to myspace Is the best example you can think of... Even with non-coud computing.
Converting you Informix Data to SQL Server. Converting you C++ code to java. Converting your Flash to HTML... It is not a problem with could computing it is a problem that systems programed by different people and don't follow the same sets of standards don't work with each other.

Data conversion is always expensive and bound to have errors unless it is done so often that there is a clean process to do so.

It is not a question do you want to be stuck, but more of a question who do you want to be stuck too.

Re:Is there any good alternative...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Converting you Informix Data to SQL Server. Converting you C++ code to java. Converting your Flash to HTML...

Actually, I was thinking more of things like converting your .doc files to ODF (without breaking something), converting your Outlook calendar to any other calendaring tool (and interacting with other workers who didn't), ad infinitum.

Or attaching another vendor's peripheral to your mainframe computer.

Vendor lock-in as a business model has been a way of life in computing since before computers were "personal". This aspect of "the cloud" businesses is nothing new.

That's all you're saying.

[Anonymous Coward]

Blah blah, I'm morally bankrupt.

Data sticks where it lands...

[religious freak]

It's not a new phenomenon, and I believe the saying has been around since the 60's. Migration of data has always been and will always be an issue to tackle.

Irony ?

[Anonymous Coward]

The great irony, of course, is that it's all built with open source.

So how come that's ironic ? The software that is used for the the infrastructure may be Open Source, but it's the content or additional 'services' that gets you 'locked-in'. It's a very common business practice these days, and certainly is not limited to cloud computing. Even major commercial Linux distributions like Red Hat give the software (including sources) away for free, but charge you for additional services like support. Similarly, my ISP may run an Open Source OS and mail daemon on their servers, but still charge me for (additional) email accounts or storage.

Move along, nothing to see here...

But, backup solutions are there

[CountryGeek]

The data in the cloud doesn't have to stay in the cloud. Web technology is sufficiently advanced that cloud services can backup other cloud services. There are startups filling the need for this type of backup already - check out http://lifestreambackup.com/ - They're adding services as customers request them. "Hotel California" is a catchy phrase for this article, but the open nature of the web helps to insure that there are no "Hotel California" services.

Cloud Computing = Ultimate Vaporware

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UYa6gQC14o

1.0

[fireball84513]

to capitalism! and the irony that although in its necessity, there is born some of our deepest frustrations.

how many Googles in a Facebook?

[Ephemeriis]

Prolific blogger and open source enthusiast Matt Asay ponders whether cloud computing may be the Hotel California of tech. It seems that data repositories in the form of Googles and Facebooks are very easy to dump data into, but can be quite difficult to move data between.

Mentioning Google specifically may not be terribly helpful with their Data Liberation Front project...

And with the APIs available for Twitter and Facebook it probably wouldn't be too hard to dump most of the important information to some kind of file.

Or is he talking more about the Amazon-type cloud stuff? But isn't that already fairly portable? Amazon is just running a pile of VMs running Linux/Windows/Apache/MySQL/whatever...

Granted, there's all sorts of hickups and loopholes and oddities with various hosted/cloud services right now... But I haven't seen anything any worse than the vendor lock-in you get with a lot of software you run on your very own hardware.

What worries me...

[mbone]

What really worries me about cloud data storage is, can you delete it ?

I would assume not.

I am not being snarky, and I have no evidence, but I would assume anything written to the cloud will be available to anyone with any interest and persuasion to get it. Persuasion in this case include both court orders and anything available to a national intelligence service.

Re:Your official guide to the Jigaboo presidency

[religious freak]

This is the idiot that posts this nonsense... http://slashdot.org/~mister_playboy

He forgot to hit the anonymous button on his last post. I still don't understand what the point is... these guys never even respond when I ask.

Atonomo.us?

[Goaway]

Why do we care what has been "recently noted" on some mailing list we haven't ever heard of?

Analogy ?

[lbalbalba]

Ok, I *really* don't get this 'Hotel California' analogy.... but maybe that's caused by the fact that 'The Eagles' are like way before my time ?

" ... Welcome to the hotel california
Such a lovely place... "

Re:Analogy ?

[jellomizer]

Welcome to the cloud from california
Such a lovely place
Such a lovely trace
Plenty of room at the cloud from california
Any time of year, you can find it here

Same mantra as Storage virtualization

[HockeyPuck]

In the past few years we've seen storage virtualization appear on the market. This is where you have some appliance that sits in front of your heterogeneous disk arrays and in turn presents a single type of lun/disk to all of your hosts. That way all the hosts will use the same loadbalancing software (powerpath, sdd, hdlm etc..) regardless of what type (brand or model) of back end storage you have. While this seems great in that you can buy IBM one month, EMC DMX the next, followed by HDS the third as whoever has the cheapest $/GB price and all the intelligence (replication for example) is in the appliance.

The problem is what do you do when you need to migrate to someone else's Virtualization appliance? Going from IBM SVC to EMC InVista is no easy task and would most likely force you to end up performing host based migrations (VxVM, LVM etc..). Not a pretty thought when you have to put together plans for HPUX, AIX, Solaris, windows, Linux, Vmware etc etc etc.

Clouds are not different than the above example. You've got some sort of virtualized environment and when it's time to move to a new virtualized environment it's back to the dark ages of migration.

Of course this would lead someone to create a Virtualized Virtualization appliance. Which would sit between you and the virtualization appliance or cloud and provide yet another layer.

Re:Same mantra as Storage virtualization

[Phishcast]

A little off-topic, but if you're moving from one vendor's storage virtualization approach to another's, I agree that you may need to do some sort of painful host-based migration. But if you're buying storage from multiple vendors you're basically stuck doing a lot of host-based migrations anyhow. Throwing storage virtualization into the mix means you'll only need to do this when you want to change virtualization vendors rather than every time you buy another storage array.

There is somewhat of a lock-in factor with storage virtualization, but it sure can be useful once you've got it. For completely non-disruptive data migration the work what would otherwise take months for a team of people can be scripted by one person and trickled over in a few weeks.

Re:Same mantra as Storage virtualization

[HockeyPuck]

However you're probably aware that storage vendors are selling storage virtualization solutions that go infront of their own disk arrays so that even if you 'kicked out' the array vendor; you'd still be stuck with the same vendor who is selling you the virtualization appliance.

Oblig. Lebowski

[Chess Piece Face]

I hate the fucking Eagles!

Article Breakdown

[Plasmic]

There are two key problems with this article:

Apples and Oranges

From the perspective of data being stored in the cloud there are several unique cases. I'll pick two examples, but, as other posters have pointed out, the issues facing each are vastly different:

• Google Apps/SalesForce: There is a clear choice between in-the-cloud and in-house: you can host key corporate data (customer contacts, email, etc.) or you can build in-house CRM, ERP, and/or Email. Amazon Computing Cloud fits here, as well, insofar as you have an in-house alternative: build your own VM environments in your own data center with all data hosted locally.
• MySpace/Facebook: Aside from not being back-office business systems, you are not (intentionally) putting corporate data in the cloud and there is no real on-premise alternative for social networking. By definition, you want to connect to everyone. Yes, I know there are enterprise collaboration/IM tools (e.g. Google Wave), but these fall within the first scenario. Social networking tools are fundamentally enabled by being publicly available on the Internet, i.e. in the cloud.

Vendor Interoperability
The point of this article -- vendor interoperability, especially around data conversion -- is an interesting one. But I would've thought that it was self-evident without having to raise examples that it's not an issue specific to the cloud: if I want to switch from one in-house technology to another (Oracle to SAP, Lotus to Exchange, Novell to Microsoft, etc.), it's an enormous pain in the ass. Especially between vendors, it's always difficult, and often impossible to transfer all data in full. There's no conversion script for me to take my Nortel PBX call queuing and scripting and magically transfer it to my Cisco Unity Call Manager. If my organization wants to switch from one in-house ERP to another, it's often a 12-18 month process: harvesting, transforming and normalizing, scrubbing, loading, and finalizing the data, and that doesn't even address the workflow, business process, or other issues.

While the issue of being locked into a particular vendor, product, or data format is never going away and merits further discussion, the answer is entirely independent of the cloud: hope/ensure that your contracts dictate the necessary level of flexibility in importing/exporting data from a given business application/system ... or you could be screwed (both on-premise and in-the-cloud).

So...who really likes this "cloud" anyway?

[MpVpRb]

Like pen-based computing before it, Cloud computing is a movement created and sustained by the hive-mind of the pundit class, eagerly supported by the hucksters, with everyone trying to make a buck.

The personal computing revolution was all about control. Taking control away from the glass-walled priesthood of the mainframes, and giving it to the people.

I, for one, will never give up control over my important data. To me, the cloud is a nightmare where you have to pay your computing bill, just like your electric bill...or they will turn off your data.

verbal meme?

[FornaxChemica]

Funny, I saw this same Hotel California analogy a few days ago in a tweet. Where did it all start? These people must have seen it somewhere else, this is some kind of verbal meme. It often happens I noticed, a word or a comparison you wouldn't normally use that suddenly spread all around the Net.

Anyway, I thought this one was referring to the lyrics of Hotel California and specifically to this line: "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave".

Applied to cloud computing, I also like that one: "This could be Heaven or this could be Hell"

So which is it? Difficult or impossible? Or both?

[falconwolf]

"The difficult I'll do right now,
the impossible will take a little while."

Both Billy Holiday and Rod Steward sang it, with one letter difference. Personally I prefer Billy Holiday's rendition.

What would stop you from taking your data out of the cloud? SFTP not allowed? Can't access Mysql DB from outside? I'm asking honestly - I'd love to know.

Now back to the subject...
I just asked another poster if it's easy to move from say one database to another. Say I'm using MySQL but find out I need Oracle instead, can I move my database easily? Or will I have to convert it? If it has to be converted can it be done automatically or does it need to be done by hand? I'm hoping to start a photography business, which may not be a good idea during the recession, and want to start by using FOSS. If I find out later the FOSS tools I'm using isn't enough and I have to switch to other tools I don't want a hassle converting.

Falcon

No, quit asking for depth!

[Plasmic]

Can someone give a little depth to the vague and unsubstantiated comment in TFA

No one can give you any depth, because it doesn't exist -- this article is fluff and the only supporting posts on this board sound like the old-world IT crowd spouting off, "Nothing beats having your own data!". They also bury their money in their own yard, so as not to avoid outsourcing their money with in-the-cloud financial providers (aka banks). After all, it's almost as difficult to switch "banks" as to go from MySpace to Facebook, i.e. the sky is falling.

I'm being sarcastic, but the point is that it's clear from an efficiency perspective that using services in the cloud can offer a net benefit to some organizations. This requires that we (the IT community) work together to make sure the new complexities (data ownership, privacy, security, interoperability, etc.) are mitigated as much as possible ... as opposed to a fundamental resistance to this feeling of losing control that many IT people succumb to when confronted with new technologies.

Every organization has differing requirements and the cloud is not the solution to every problem for every application for every organization -- but let's at least be accurate about what the pro's and con's are so that, in cases where it is better, we don't slow down the adoption.

Depends on the cloud...

[Maudib]

I guess I don't consider things like Facebook true cloud computing.

Take AWS for example. Getting data out could not be simpler.
Have a EC2 instance? Snapshot it, or snapshot an attached EBS and drop the data on to S3. Download it to your hearts content.
Have data in SimpleDB? Its a DB, designed for querying, that outputs XML...

The real problem is that "Cloud Computing" has become a big tent that is coming to include a lot of things it shouldn't. I don't see why facebooks API is included in it. Webservices != Cloud necessarily.

THC? Thought that was myspace...

[spinkham]

Myspace reminds me of THC, and I kinda get the munchies when going there too.. Face book, not so much...

Wait, we were talking about personally identifiable information here, not drug songs? My bad..

How bout the obligatory car analogy?

[Radical Moderate]

Like, "If you park your car in your neighbor's garage, you might not be able to move it when you want to"

Sorry, tht's the best I got, and I've got stuff to do.

I don't think that is considered in the cloud...

[Anonymous Coward]

As I understand it, cloud computing can be a cloud application, like google. Or you can actually run your own servers in the cloud, to which you would have complete control of the data and could dump it at will.

To my limited understanding, the word cloud means "A group of infrastructure, services, etc. that we don't need to know details about and thus can just call vaguely as 'cloud'". I think that in CCNA materials it went something along those lines.

So what you describe would mean that there is you, there is servers that you have detailed information about and can control and there is cloud inbetween to connect the two but the server itself would certainly not be a part of the cloud. It would just be server physically away from you. It really needs to be just "Something that we can use through API/similar way without having to know any underlying details" or such to be cloud computing. If you need to know anything more than that, it's not a part of the cloud.

Re:Your official guide to the Jigaboo presidency

[CyberLord Seven]

Wish I had mod-points. This is informative.

Accept your future: the cloud.

[Plasmic]

Why would you ever give up control of your money, but not your important data? Or are you saying that you don't put your money in banks or investments? Perhaps you're comfortable with the balance of control that you have over your money vs. the financial institution when combined with the protections afforded to you by various regulations, government agencies, and legal precedent. Do you suppose this would be impossible to put in place for in-the-cloud applications?

If people spent as much time exploring how to make cloud applications better as they did bashing them, we would get to our inevitable future much more quickly and painlessly.

cloud != app engine

[alien9]

AFAIK, using an instance of ec2 doesn't differ (by my POW) from having a 'physical' server. I use a very basic setup with Debian, and really don't matter where are the host right now (East Coast, they told me).
After initial setup it is accessible through ssh or whatever server you might want to install.
They provide pretty complete control over the machine, plus a very simple front-end to firewall and IP redirect.
Not that different from the 'physical' server we have and much more seamless to upgrade, and no hardware issues to wonder about.

Not really.

[Ender_Wiggin]

Not quite the same everywhere.

Let's take google for example. I can export my google calendars in XML or iCal format. GMail is accessible via IMAP where I can pull all my messages off of it. Google reader has an API, so it would be pretty simple to pull the RSS feeds and the read/unread/shared/starred articles out. Pretty much the same with MobileMe.

You could be the Editor-in-Chief at CNET!

[Plasmic]

The best part is that you're 100% correct -- and the only reason you're questioning yourself is because it's just so obvious that you're confused as to why it's a discussion. I suggest CNET publish your post as a cover story.

3 Things You Need to Know About Cloud Computing

• Web services != Cloud: Don't consider things like Facebook true cloud computing
• For most cloud applications, getting data out of the cloud could not be simpler
• The real problem is that "Cloud Computing" has become a big tent that is coming to include a lot of things it shouldn't.

They adore titles with both numbers and buzzwords in them, so I don't see how they could resist.

Simply outdated

[Plasmic]

There's nothing like keeping your own data on your own system..

Or burying your own money in your own yard.

Re:Simply outdated

[Voyager529]

the difference is that if I put my money in an account at First National Bank, I can choose to transfer money to another person in the same bank, transfer to a person at a different bank, and if I decide to close out the account, I can easily get all of my money in a form that any other bank, business, or individual will accept.

Re:Simply outdated

[mcgrew]

Hey, you stole badanalogyguy's comment. Does the data you keep in "the cloud" OPS earn interest? You get 5% extra data just for keeping it in OPS?

That was a HORRIBLE analogy. Got one with a car in it?

Re:Simply outdated

[Plasmic]

The analogy is very clear: you get benefits from storing your data in the cloud, just like you get benefits from storing your money in the bank -- but at the expense of some degree of control. Those benefits aren't completely identical (as evidenced by your nonsensical, literal interpretation of the analogy as "data earning interest"), nor is the degree of loss of control identical.

While it's still an early-adopter market, I stand by the point that people being afraid to put their money in a bank is similar to people being afraid to put their data in the cloud, though you're free to disagree.

Re:Simply outdated

[mcgrew]

I stand by the point that people being afraid to put their money in a bank is similar to people being afraid to put their data in the cloud

Well, if you're talking about people in the 1930s afraid to put their money in the bank, yes, I agree with you. There was no FDIC and if your bank failed, you lost all (or most) of your money. The situation is similar here -- if you put your data in OPS (and are too dumb to back it up) and the provider goes out of business, you lose your data. Like people in the 1930s, there is a very good reason to fear keeping your data in OPS.

consider Tmobile/sidekick

[Anonymous Coward]

5 days without access to my contacts, that i assumed to be stored on my sim card or sd card are now lost in the cloud, while Tmobile / danger /Microsoft pound out lies on a fix date. If i had known MY data wasn't stored on my phone to begin with i would have never got a sidekick. I'm too enraged to login or even type anything well thought out. Check the top trends on twitter or
http://gizmodo.com/5373946/the-great-t+mobile-sidekick-data-outage-of-2009-could-end-monday-maybe
or the t mobile sidekick help forums if your interested in how much of a disaster cloud computing can be. After 5 hours and 3 tries to reach their support I'm going to bed.
 

Re:consider Tmobile/sidekick

[glenstar]

That was the major factor in my decision to never own a Sidekick. Did you not see all of the news stories about 'celebrities' having their Sidekick's hacked into? For a long period of time TMobile had a special little website that Sidekick user's could go to to look at their data. Scary shit.

GPL3 and AGPL

[nadaou]

Think what you will about RMS, but if the man was handing out stock tips (and indirectly he is) you'd be a fool to dismiss out of hand where he thought the market would be going in 3-5 years time.

Re:GPL3 and AGPL

[BitZtream]

If you follow that douchebag for your stock tips, you'll just end up broke, having spent all your hard earned money purchasing stocks which you promptly give away to everyone else.

I'm sorry, Stallman would probably be the worst person on the planet to listen to for stock market advice, directly or indirectly.

You should listen to him, and make sure to avoid any company he thinks is going to do well.

Re:GPL3 and AGPL

[nadaou]

Case in point: IBM listened|agreed to where he thought the market was going and is today, even in a crappy economy, making boat loads of cash; Sun Microsystems did not until the ship was already sinking fast. Based on repeated stellar past performance predicting how things would go (usually met with derision at the time), it is possible to accept that he has a deep understanding of "the situation" without buying into his notion of what we should then do about it.

The REAL question is...

[93 Escort Wagon]

... what the heck are "colitas"?

Re:The REAL question is...

[ChefInnocent]

That funny smell coming off the tiny, home rolled, cigarette like thing that doesn't smell like tobacco? Yeah, that smell is coming from the little "bud".

Such services are efforts to privatize the web...

[Kazoo the Clown]

The web is about freely exchanged, individually generated content. Facebook, myspace, twitter, et. al., are about taking that free exchange and privatizing it. The problem is not that they're doing it, but that people don't realize they're doing it and actually patronize these restrictive services because of the pretty shiny things the services hold up in front of them.

But if you haven't noticed, such things do have a tendency to be faddish and users soon tire of them. The reason for this is that real open web services that can do similar things are not all that hard to devise and do not have the restrictions on functionality that proprietary systems must impose in order to maintain their business models. So ultimately they cannot compete in the free realm unless they can capture sufficient share and that in itself becomes a feature that is hard to compete against (much like eBay, where an auction site is not all that hard to develop, but requires sufficient user base out of the box to have any hope of competing with eBay). It strikes me though that social networking so far at least, doesn't provide sufficient lock-in based on number of users. Some may disagree about that with a site such as Facebook, but I suspect the right cute social interchange software that lacks Facebook's proprietary restrictions could produce a mass-exodus rather quickly I would think. It wouldn't take long for some new shiny toy to attract the fickle users to another new service-- and they're all free (of charge) after all, even if they're not free (as in freedom).

And for those of you who don't get the "restrictions" thing (as in "what restrictions?"), perhaps you wonder why Facebook hosts your images themselves rather than allowing you to host them elsewhere, and why you are limited in what HTML you can put on your facebook page? Facebook wants to do a couple of things, that it doesn't want you to do. Facebook wants to track the activity on your page, and won't allow you to track your own. If you had the ability to add an externally hosted image to your page or sufficient HTML, you could track the users who access your Facebook information, and in fact, potentially alter it based on who the user is. If you had the ability to control your Facebook pages to that extent, you could probably set up your own advertising space as well-- another thing that Facebook is "faced" with restricting in order to protect their raison d'etre.

Analogy Fail

[EXrider]

Does Cloud Computing have mirrors on the ceiling or pink champagne on ice?

Re:Such services are efforts to privatize the web.

[kimvette]

It's more likely that Facebook has those restrictions in place so it doesn't turn into Myspace II and cause the userbase to implode. They want to keep the value of the users high for advertisers. Hence keeping it clean, allowing only limited HTML, and allowing users to vote (thumbs up, thumbs down) on individual ads. They have a much better long-term model compared to myspace. Myspace has driven away most conservative and moderate users, and the garish customizing of profiles has driven away pretty much everyone over the age of 18. You know, the people who actually have money and therefore value to advertisers.

What facebook is doing is smart. I'd like to tweak my profile a bit, but if not allowing profile customizations prevents making the site looks like someone just discovered html and fonts and colors and doesn't know how to mix them well, I'm all for keeping facebook plain-looking and letting them host my images. If I want to put in a link to another site to refer users to another image, I'll do that.

Besides, I'm sick of 3,000-pixel-wide myspace profiles and seeing Myspace users hijack my image files (which get a 301 redirect to a photo of dog poo when I notice the hotlinking in the server logs).

Just like file formats

[HalAtWork]

It's just like file formats. They used to provide the capability to store certain data that can be read back and used. Now file formats are only editable by certain applications and cannot be interpreted by others so they cannot be converted. Applications that have perfect support for these formats place restrictions on how they can be manipulated. So in the end, the user cannot do what they want with their data, on the web, but on the desktop too.

Re:Just like file formats

[dbIII]

The answer, as done this week by co-workers importing data from the 1970s, is just to make sure that the file format is well documented. An extreme example is the amanda backup program - documentation on how to extract the archives is in ascii text at the start of each volume.

Re:Your official guide to the Jigaboo presidency

[PitaBred]

Looks like the classic GNAA troll. But I was under the impression that the group was defunct.

Re:Your official guide to the Jigaboo presidency

[religious freak]

I don't know what a "classic GNAA troll" is, but it's not a sock puppet account, I don't think. There were some normal posts before and after that flamebait post.

Sometimes I just wonder why these types of folks post - do they have a point - or are they just screwing around and not able to get a girlfriend?

It's all about the Metadata

[Aqueous Vapor]

As others have reasonably pointed out, file formats are file formats... But when you start tagging your files, commenting on them, linking them semantically to other files, etc. you start to add proprietary "metadata" to those files in whatever service you are using. So the question really is all about porting this metadata from service to service and that's where the "Hotel California" effect is applicable. Standards can help, but nobody has an incentive to participate as yet. Unless customers demand this portability and migrate to services that support it, the offerings will continue on their current path...

bullshit jargon

[xaoslaad]

mod me troll, whatever, I have karma to burn baby. Web 2.0, Software 1.0, Cloud computing; this useless jargon needs to die. It's a waste of time and has no solid definition whatsoever. What a fucking tragic waste of peoples time effort and money.

If you switch DBMS you're gonna have other

[falconwolf]

problems

That's what I meant to begin with when I talked about switching databases. Right now I want to try Firebird but may try others too.

Falcon

Re:Your official guide to the Jigaboo presidency

[PitaBred]

Kids these days with their high UID's...

http://encyclopediadramatica.com/GNAA

Re:Your official guide to the Jigaboo presidency

[gmhowell]

by PitaBred (632671)

Kids these days with their high UID's...

http://encyclopediadramatica.com/GNAA

No shit...

(Last time I made a comment like this, there were several replies leading to a 2 digit uid commenting. Can we just jump the gun/shark and get CT in here?)

Even More Simple

[binaryspiral]

Build your own cloud.

The cost savings of virtualization more than pay for building your own... and you still get to keep your data.

Re:Your official guide to the Jigaboo presidency

[religious freak]

Well... whatever floats their boat I guess.

I do feel obliged to mention that after a few (maybe four?) years on /. that was the first time I actually saw the goatse guy - and you know, it wasn't quite as disgusting as I would've thought (I once made the mistake of looking up tubgirl (shudder) - I'd put 50% odds on her being dead)

GNAA... that is really f'in stupid. Anyway, one day maybe the dude who posts this stuff will actually get laid and find something better to do with his time.. maybe.

Thanks for the edumacshun though! I didn't know it was an actual, concerted effort. Whaaaaaaaatever

Re:Your official guide to the Jigaboo presidency

[religious freak]

This troll is apx 27 years old!! HAHAHAHAHA

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1333177&cid=29031753

Honestly, if you were any kind of playboy, Mr. Playboy, I'd think you'd rather be getting laid than being a GNAA douche... Dork... grow up and get a woman, FFS.

vCloud API Standard -- ability to move elsewhere

[Mindbridge]

The vCloud API (http://www.vmware.com/solutions/cloud-computing/vcloud-api.html) is a protocol for placing VMs into a cloud, managing them, and downloading them back when needed. It was published at the last VMworld using a very liberal license and has been submitted to DMTF for standardization. While it has been initiated by VMware, the vCloud API has been designed to be implementation-agnostic and could be implemented over Xen or other hypervisors.

The whole idea is for people to be able to download the data/VMs that they have in one cloud and move it easily to another if they desire to do so. In short, this is the opposite of Hotel California.

FAEPALM!!!!

[acidbass]

This has NOTHING to do with *cloud computing* and everything to do with COMMERCIAL ENTITIES NOT SHARING CONTENT FOR REVENUE REASONS!!!!!!! This has nothing to do with technology!!!!!!!!

Re:I don't think that is considered in the cloud..

[jhfry]

I offer Amazon's EC2 as an example of cloud computing in which you maintain control of the format of you data.

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

There is nothing in "Cloud Computing" that requires API's or some other layer between you and your data.

Essentially, "Cloud Computing" is a term similar to "centralized" or "decentralized"... its vague and by no means does it define much of anything other than an idea. Cloud computing could be best described as decentralized, centralized networking. Your processing and data is centralized on a decentralized cloud rather than in a single data center. It appears to the client that it is centralized, when in reality the servers could be anywhere on the Internet.

Google is your friend

[mcgrew]

["hotel california" lyrics] should get you where you want. And before your time? Do you never go see live bands in bars? (I suspect you may be too young to do that, if so, you have a great adventure ahead of you). The twentysomethings are more into my generation's music than my generation was when the music was new (and personally, I always hated the Eagles).

Hell, there was a 27 year old in Felber's the other day with a Dead Kennedies t-shirt.

Plenty of room at the Hotel California
What a nice surprise
With your alibies

We are all just prisoners here, of our own device

You can check out any time you want but you an never leave!