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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."
Bingo.
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?
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.