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Cloud Computing Needs To Embrace the Linux Model, Says Rackspace CTO
Nerval's Lobster writes "Companies are rushing to lock customer data into their specific walled gardens, Rackspace CTO John Engates argued in an interview after a Cloud Expo keynote in Silicon Valley. That makes it more important than ever to ensure that the cloud undergirding all the various functions of daily life remains open. 'These companies have grown up in the era of enterprise software and they're addicted to enterprise software margins, magnitudes more profitable than what we make as a hosting company,' he said. 'Now you have software companies embracing cloud computing and taking the same enterprise-software playbook they've had for years and trying to run it in the cloud.' Ultimately, he added, cloud computing needs to adopt the Linux model. 'Linux opened it up and gave you vendor choice, with numerous vendors bringing their own strengths to the table.'"
GNU model...
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
I guess some people have a problem with their computing history. Oh well, I don't expect much anymore.
Or did i get it totally?
'These companies have grown up in the era of enterprise software and they're addicted to enterprise software margins, magnitudes more profitable than what we make as a hosting company,'
which translates into: I have picked the wrong business model, and someone should fix it for me.
Never rely on your service provider to "protect" your data. Make sure you have copies of your code, configs and data. If you're running your business on "the cloud" (or any other remote server) and you can't tollerate downtime, make sure you have an alternative "disaster recovery" server ready to go.
captcha: valued
I'd love to see some of these cloud storage services start opening up their protocols instead of relying on security through obscurity. I have a dropbox account, and I'd rather like to be able to use it on Linux without a silly proprietary daemon (and also on non-x86 platforms.)
Didn't Compuserv through AOL try this a long time ago? And didn't it work great until users discovered the internet?
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
why wouldn't he
For every benefit you receive a tax is levied. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
In cloud-speak, we call it "IaaS" ("infrastructure as as service"), but if you need some Linux servers, some Windows servers, some database servers, whatever, there's plenty of competition between commodity providers, including RackSpace, already.
There are a few dozen large competitors (also including RackSpace) also trying to get people locked in with "PaaS" ("platform as a service"), but by and large companies are either too smart or too poor (no resources for initial development or migration) to jump into that shark tank.
Ultimately, he added, cloud computing needs to adopt the Linux model.
Translation: "Please, please, please don't use EC2. Oh yeah, and Amazon beats its wife."
It must be because openess doesn't mean shit in the cloud world. It hosts apps that get dialed up and down. What's behind it is unimportant.
The "everyone should run our open (tm) software" plea. I'm not falling for it. No customer is demanding "cloud portability" because customers don't want to change ISP, ever. I just don't think portability of whole VM networks will ever be feasible on a technical level. Even if you could shuffle IPv4 addresses and masses of data around the whole internet between providers without down time, there's no incentive for ISPs to cooperate, or willingly turn themselves into a cheaper sub-brand of Rackspace. It would instantly put them at a competitive disadvantage. Your entire business model controlled by a competitor? You can go to Parallels for that; their software works out of the box, it will gladly migrate ISPs for you, and the per-customer fees are reasonable!
The customers who have sussed cloud portability already have it through tools like puppet, rigid version control, or a tightly-specced development environment supported by lots of ISPs (PHP, Java, .net - ish). The customers that don't have a portable setup won't magically get it through an "open" hosting API, they will be lashed to their current provider as they always have been.
Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
Hmm. All of the major cloud vendors support pretty much every platform. I happen to have an MSDN Ultimate subscription through work and we're investigating Azure as a result (1,500 hours per month of computer time for free for each Ultimate account).
I will admit that I code in C# so the platform integrates well. It only took me two days to learn the platform basics and setup a computational system with queues and a dedicated cache (one WebRole, one CacheRole, multiple WorkerRoles to process work units).
I'm working on the job unit system now, pretty complicated algorithm, although the design lends itself to distributed analysis.
Anyway, the major vendors support all of the major platforms. Choose one based on trust and performance (and integration if you please).
BlameBillCosby.com
He's not talking about the OS running on the individual IaaS VMs, he's talking about the middleware that supports auth, scaling, provisioning, etc through APIs and applications or portals targeted at them. The case in point for Rackspace is Open Stack.