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Red Hat Wants to be a Dominant Force in the Cloud (Video)
Red Hat has two primary Cloud Evangelists: Gordon Haff and Richard Morrell. Richard says this about himself: "I'm Red Hat's Cloud Security Blogger and Cloud Evangelist based in Europe. Passionate about good code and Open Hybrid Cloud. Founder of SmoothWall protecting millions of networks for 13 years globally. My blogging and my podcasting is my own editorial and does not represent the views of Red Hat..." We have known Richard since the 20th Century, so this interview has been a long time coming. In it, he talks about how Red Hat is working to become as strong in the Open Source cloud world as it already is in GNU/Linux. This interview may not "represent the views of Red Hat," but it obviously represents the views of a loyal Red Hat employee who is also a long-time Linux enthusiast.
A buddy of mine spent a lot of money earlier this year to attend a Red Hat convention and take the (Paid) cloud training. What a waste. While the training was hands but very simple. The trainer didn't know much more than the attendees and it seemed clear to all parties involved it was not ready for prime time.
There's no video showing up, only blank space. This is 2013 guys, Flash died years ago.
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There are a lot of cloud providers, but what would be nice is a standard on client-side encryption and key management [1], regardless of what cloud provider destination. That way, if I'm sending files to Dropbox, S3, Glacier, RH's cloud, Azure, or another provider, all I have to do is change out the name and authentication info, not have to use a completely different API. This would also allow me to have redundant cloud storage for vital documents, automatically retrieving a document even if one of the providers is offline.
[1]: Key management is just as important as encryption, but it is something that gets forgotten about until a disaster, and one has a nice pile of tapes... but no way to decrypt them.
That's fine, nobody is forcing you to make money off of networked computers.
Personally, I'd rather do business with RedHat than Amazon if pricing and service is comparable. Especially if Open Source means I have a turn-key package to run my own hosting, with the same VMs, on my own servers to handle the minimum load, and then I can buy the extra peak load from RedHat. That would be heaven.
Right now it is a bit of a pain, because the typical setup is hand-managed servers for the minimum, and then proprietary tools for the cloud compute units. Nobody is really bridging that in a way that lets the customer take advantage of price savings.
And by the way, it is the exact same NSA regardless of if my hosting provider is company A, or company B. Totally not relevant.