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

[sycodon]

So data checks in but doesn't check out?

That's more like the Roach Motel.

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

[lavacano201014]

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

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

[roguetrick]

Ya'll down with OPS.

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

Is Yahoo! the Facebook of webmail?

[BitHive]

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

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

[rockNme2349]

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

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

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.

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?"

[amicusNYCL]

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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: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. ;)

Perhaps not the best analogy.

[greenguy]

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

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

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: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: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.

Simply outdated

[Plasmic]

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

Or burying your own money in your own yard.

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.