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Microsoft, Amazon Oppose Cloud Computing Interoperability Plan
Posted by
Soulskill
on Fri Mar 27, 2009 06:29 PM
from the stormy-weather dept.
from the stormy-weather dept.
thefickler writes "Microsoft is opposing an industry plan, the Open Cloud Manifesto, to promote cloud computing interoperability. Officially, Microsoft says the plan is unnecessarily secretive and that cloud computing is still in an early stage of development,
but there are allegations that Microsoft feels threatened by the plan because it could boost Linux-based systems. The goal of the group behind the manifesto, the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum (CCIF), is to minimize the barriers between different technologies used in cloud computing. And this is where the problem seems to lie, with the group stating that 'whenever possible the CCIF will emphasize the use of open, patent-free and/or vendor-neutral technical solutions.' Some speculate that Microsoft is actually worried that this will allow open source systems, such as Linux, to flourish, at the expense of Microsoft technology."
Amazon is also declining to support the plan, saying, "the best way to illustrate openness and customer flexibility is by what you actually provide and deliver for them." Reader smack.addict contributes a link to an O'Reilly piece asking what openness really means for cloud computing.
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whatWHAT? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:whatWHAT? (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft... complains about something because it is too secretive?
Hard to corrupt something you're excluded from...</paranoid>
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No, I don't think they had a section on hell freezing over. But there was a bit on how, after the thousand years of heaven on Earth, there'd be a thousand years of hell on Earth. That must be when Microsoft buys out the Linux cloud services.
Microsoft opposition is a given (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Microsoft opposition is a given (Score:4, Insightful)
Could anyone summarize what this "cloud computing" is, and why exactly is it so newsworthy? I tried to read the wiki, but it burned out my buzzword detector in the second sentence.
Parent
Re:Microsoft opposition is a given (Score:5, Informative)
In the broad senses, it's not really caring where your data or applications is. So it could be stored in some data center half a world away.
It's just always available.
You ask 7 people for anything more specific then that and you will get 9 answers.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So it doesn't really mean anything, just sounds cool?
That would explain why the wiki is so marvellously information-free.
Basically, it is not caring about servers (Score:5, Informative)
You don't have to maintain infrastructure to deal with your peak loads. You just have to keep enough to handle the baseline and than when you get hammered, you "turn on" more "computers" as you go. In theory, those "computers" could be located anywhere, so if you are mentioned on some UK news show and get hammered over there, you can "turn on" more of your "computers" to handle the load and turn them off when you are done.
In other words, basically, you have an infinite amount of computers which start almost instantly that you pay by the hour/minute for. Each of them boots off a standard image you control and all of the service providers have ways to script things like "hey, I've just been booted! lets tell the load balancer to add me to the pool!"
In yet other words, it is basically like a distributed virtual server. Take a single image and on-demand, load up as many virtual servers as you need.
Parent
And to follow up to myself (Score:4, Interesting)
Here are two excellent use cases:
It is 9/11 and slashdot was hammered. I am too lazy to cite, but they were shoving extra computers into the rack to keep the thing online (slashdot was pretty much the only place that wasn't hammered). With cloud computing, they'd just fire up as many extra servers as the load needs and turn them all off when they are done.
Dailykos. Election night. Rather than buying a shit-ton more hardware to handle such peak loads, they'd just fire up as many extra "computers" as they need and pay for like 24 hours of use.
Your Blog. Slashdot, Digg, Fark and New York Times link to your article about Captain Kirk. Too much traffic? Nonsense... fire up a pool of servers in the cloud and turn them off when you are done!
Parent
Re:Basically, it is not caring about servers (Score:5, Interesting)
And this is exactly why it will fail!
If you have been following the news the governments of the world have become extremely NOSEY! This means (and I am right now personally experiencing it) companies DO care who and what is being shared. In my case we do not want servers in certain jurisdictions. I work for an investment bank, and my laptop does not go outside of Switzerland.
Look at what happened to wikileaks in Germany. Or look at what private banks have been advising their bankers! They say no travel outside of Switzerland.
Right now "cloud computing" is completely ignoring this issue and it will come back to haunt them.
That's why I am extremely skeptical that cloud computing will take off. Since those that would and can pay for it will not take advantage of it.
Parent
You are talking edge cases (Score:4, Insightful)
For starters, you will not run your HIPAA compliant health care system or your damn investment bank datacenter using some random shmucks pool of servers. That is silly. Privacy issues aside, both systems probably have very predictable loads and wouldn't benefit from cloud computing.
Second, even if you did, you'll probably be able to specify which data centers your virtual machines will run. After all, they want to charge you more for running stuff overseas!
Third, you aren't the market. Startups and web companies with spikey traffic are. If you have a predictable amount of traffic, odds are good this kind of provisioning would cost more. But if you are prone to unpredictable spikes, or you just don't want to deal with maintaining your own equipment, this is probably a good deal.
Lastly, just because RMS says something is evil [guardian.co.uk], doesn't mean he is right. I'll just leave it at that. I know you didn't specify the keyword "RMS", but rest assured that there are a lot of "haters" who have never even heard of the term before that windbag piped up. Now they hate it without even knowing what it means (kinda like how RMS hates it without understanding it).
This statement makes no sense. You take advantage of it by *not* using it. That is the point. You only pay for what you use and no more. Prior to cloud computing (okay, the term is kinda silly), you'd have to provision for your peak load. Now you just provision for your baseline and fire up a potentially infinite pool of servers during peak loads.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
THANK-YOU...
This is exactly what I was talking about. The cloud computing intiative is completely missing these aspects. And it is these aspects that will form the future of computing.
In 1999 I said at a conference that the future of computing is not in the algorithms, but in the data that the algorithms manipulate.
I said if you had the choice in 1999 to destroy either the harddisk containing the data, or the harddisk containing the algorithms, which would you choose?
Answer the algorithms. What this means i
But in reality, it's about the data (Score:4, Insightful)
Moving system images around isn't that tough to do, but moving the context of that image and it's data are still challenges that lead to differences between the VM providers. If it were as simple as "provide an image", then there wouldn't be much of a market for the cloud computing providers to compete over.
This is a young industry. It's far too early to try to standardize on stacks beyond those being provided by the players in the cloud industry. Sure one could pick a stack of best-of-breed FOSS solutions for the raw technology, but that's not going to address the real interoperability costs of getting the raw data closer to the users without losing integrity.
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FOSS has nothing to do with it (Score:5, Interesting)
First, the "cloud" doesn't run on anything. The "cloud" is basically a metaphor for an virtually infinite amount of servers you can fire up running your system image at once. It doesn't mean your instances are "floating" around a pool of servers--those images are running on real servers in some dudes rack and each running instance is indeed mapped to one server. If the physical server your instance is running on dies, oh well, you just fire up your image somewhere else. If you looked in the data center, you'd just see a bunch of regular servers running something like VMWare ESX (or whatever) and a bunch of fancy scripts to load and provision customer's images across the data center. You'd probably also see some serious SAN shit too.
All your instances typically connect to the same pool of shared, perminate storage. Each instance (at least on EC2) gets a couple hundred gigs of temporary disk space that goes away when you shut down that instance.
With Amazons EC2 (the only one I've played with), you can shove anything into your disk images has long as it is x64 or x86. "Anything" could be Windows Server, Linux, Sun, FreeBSD, whatever. You can download a lot of pre-build images from the community too--like "here is FreeBSD /w useful stuff already installed".
The trick right now is everybody has different ways to fire up said images. And once they are fired up, the API's your software must interact with are different. One guys way of provisioning an IP address or mounting a disk is different than another.
But this is to be expected. The whole industry is far to young to ask for standards.
Parent
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So it doesn't really mean anything, just sounds cool?
Except that it doesn't even sound cool.
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And thats why some companies do not want to see a set a standard being drafted for it right away. Its not even set in stone what Cloud Computing is to begin with!.
But basically, its a design/architecture philosophy that would state that you put your application/code/whatever somewhere, and you dont really care about its physical environment, scaling, etc, because all that is a bit magical (in the "cloud"), and you may have a bunch of these apps in the "cloud" talking to each other, without really being in y
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Cloud computing meant different things at different times. Right now it seems to mean a virtual data center.
You can have a virtual server or a series of virtual servers. So think of it as if you were planning the hardware for a start-up. You might need 2 webservers, 4 application servers and a database server.
That's a lot of hardware to buy. Instead you can use virtual servers. There is no upfront cost and you only pay for them while they're running. In the beginning you may only need 2 app servers then one
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It's a scheme to get us all back to using low resource hardware to connect to the net, which will store all our apps and data so we have to pay to access them. The idea is to eliminate privacy, "piracy", and of course FOSS.
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As others have noted, there are many different definitions and comparisons. These are the ones I tend to use, though:
Almost (Score:2)
If all you could do is turn them on, the whole thing would be pointless and you might as well go back to owning your own infrastructure. The cost savings comes from being able to pay only for what you use, no more, no less.
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Openness implies lower barriers to entry. If they control the technology, they control the admission price. If you want to play on our 'cloud' then it's going to cost a CAL.
If Microsoft were a country, they'd be very wealthy. I believe the exchange rate is $1.00EUC to ~$85.00USD. (EUC - Exchange User Cal)
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Openness implies lower barriers to entry. If they control the technology, they control the admission price. If you want to play on our 'cloud' then it's going to cost a CAL.
Put another way "All your base are belong to US, not THEM!!!!". Cloud computing is not about giving you the ability to do new things. It's about tying you to the network for everything you do including what you can currently do independently then charging a mint when they've got you by the balls. They don't want to share that wealth with
Seems bad, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
IBM
SUN
CloudCamp
Zero Nines
and some others.
Similar to when Facebook started becoming the dominant social networking site, a few of the others got together to try to make a public API so it is easy for users to switch between sites. Typical corporate politics.
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in reality it is just a matter of their competition trying to get a piece of the action.
If a bunch of companies want to gang up on the big dogs, and their chosen weapon is openness, I don't really have a problem with that.
Of course that's only if it ends up really open, but IBM and SUN have done it before.
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Somewhat understandable (Score:5, Interesting)
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Its way too early, in the same way that HTML/CSS and various other web technologies were made a "standard" way before we knew where the web was going, even vaguely. Right now people are still debating whats the best USE of Cloud Computing...so any standards drafted now will miss the mark by miles.
One thing all these guys could do (Score:2)
Is let me import my damn VMWare image. That or get VMWare to suck down their images. Then I could run an instance of my machines locally. Really, aren't all these things basically nothing more than fancy ISO files?
But maybe you and I are both thinking too low level. "High level" would be dealing with what is *on* the virtual machines, not the images themselves. Then you are talking things like IP configuration, where crap is on the disk, etc...
Or maybe I'm just full of it. But I was surprised that nob
But a closed system is bad right Mr Balmer? (Score:3, Interesting)
Queue expected sarcastic eye roll.
eh? (Score:2)
> "Microsoft is opposing an industry plan, the Open Cloud Manifesto..."
And in the traditional effort to cover butts, B. Gates, in attendance at Davos, participated in celebrating OC startups that are working to bring OC to fruition. As one attendee stated "You have to be open to having your data shared..." - and we know this automatically rules out MS, so until or unless MS doesn't see Google-backed OC as a threat, we can expect statements against it from MS proper to surface in the press.
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Perhaps.
There point is valid in thios case.
I actually think MS is changing. The up and coming gaurd know the industry is far too different then it was when B Gates made his plans to be the gate keeps of information. It was in their 1000 year plan.
No, to survive they will need to open up is some regards, and figure out how to get the applications into new social markets.
OTOH, when there initial complaints are no longer valid, we will see if they move the goal post.
Lack of openness? (Score:2)
MS does make some good points (Score:2)
Everything else is FUD based on speculation.
Speaking of "FUD" (Score:2)
From the summary:
Some speculate that Microsoft is actually worried that this will allow open source systems, such as Linux, to flourish, at the expense of Microsoft technology
So in other words, the "Microsoft is opposing such a Wonderful Thing (tm)" is all speculation?
FUD (Score:4, Insightful)
So in other words, the "Microsoft is opposing such a Wonderful Thing (tm)" is all speculation?
Yes you might justifiably call that FUD but In view of past experience with Microsoft, I'd say this sort of speculation is a lot more likely to turn out to be true than if we were dealing with any other randomly selected evil mega-corp. Micosoft is sitting on a hugely profitable dominant market share in a number of areas. If they lose a significant proportion of that market share they will find it significantly harder to regain that market share than it was to lose it. I'd say it's a safe bet that executives@microsoft.com spend a lot of time these days being paranoid about repeating past mistakes like when they slept through the search engine revolution and suddenly woke up to find that Google had mushroomed into a dangerous rival in a key market segment almost over night. To add insult to injury Google had actually achieved a dominant market share in that very important market segment and has proven frustratingly capable of defending it.
Parent
It is too early for this (Score:2)
What it means. (Score:2)
What Open Source means for cloud computing is customers will get more hosting options than they otherwise would. Microsoft's plan is to sell you access to both hardware and software, but Open Source software would open the hosting end of the equation to greater competition between hosting companies, allowing customers to choose between hosting companies in a manner similar to how they can today choose web hosts.
WANTED: Devil's Advocate (Score:2)
I was hoping that last link in the submission was to someone playing microsoft's side, to see why they are against it - why would want it that way, but it was just more highlighting the pluses of open source and the minuses of closed. So much of the open source noise we here is extremely one-sided. Is anyone able to link to or post up devil'd advocate on closed source cloud? There's got to be some advantages to it, and we need both sides represented here to compare them. (anyone that simply says "closed
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Is anyone able to link to or post up devil'd advocate on closed source cloud? There's got to be some advantages to it, and we need both sides represented here to compare them.
Really far-out R&D is expensive with no expected near- or medium-term payback. So it tends to be funded by companies that can charge monopoly rents, like Microsoft [wikipedia.org] or old AT&T [wikipedia.org]. It cannot be supported by providing competitive open services, so a closed cloud will result in more basic research and greater long-term innovation.
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To which the CCIF Instigator replies:
It's the standard story of the standard war (Score:2)
This is the standard story of the Standards War.
(This is mostly stolen off of Ed Felten; I think from the famous talk he was at first threated to not give, but I'm not sure my memory isn't playing tricks on me).
The standard story goes as follows:
Microsoft is trolling (Score:4, Insightful)
I think Microsoft is trolling. In this specific troll posting they are exploiting the fact that people don't realize that an open standard process does not necessarily result in an open standard. The reality is probably that the manifesto group is not willing to get subverted by them ('subvertible' is MS's definition of 'open').
Their mode of action seems to be: first try to subvert a standards process to introduce proprietary technology into it, thus giving itself an advantage; if that fails, call the process "not open enough". Proceed to form a new "more open" standards process stacked with Microsoft partners that competes with the existing one.
Are we reading the same article? (Score:2, Informative)
The 'Open Cloud Manifesto' will launch on Monday in New York. Itâ(TM)s a joint project that includes IBM, Amazon and Google among many others and aims to produce guidelines for how different operating systems should interact in cloud computing. Thatâ(TM)s a name given to services which run online rather than on a userâ(TM)s computer: think Gmail vs Microsoft Outlook for an idea.
And the CNet article does not imply a rejection by Amazon, it states:
"Like other ideas on standards and practi
Amazon in an author, Amazon is against .... (Score:2)
One article linked to says Amazon is an author of the manifesto. (http://www.itworld.com/windows/65198/cloud-computing-linux-has-microsoft-blogging)
Another article says Amazon is against it (http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10206077-56.html), but doesn't link to a reference.
I suppose both could be true, but then I would expect to know why Amazon changed their mind.
From inside the trenches (Score:4, Informative)
From someone that is following this closely from within the "cloud services community", has read every article, every relevant blog, twitter, forum, and newsgroup post, I hope I can bring some enlightenment to this issue.
The CCIF is an organization that is supposed to be little more than an "open forum" between those in the cloud services community. I'm not certain if its role should even be to make such statements or issue documents, but if it is, that those statements should be discussed and agreed upon by its members. This manifesto appears to have been created secretly by the founders of the CCIF without discussion, review, or disclosure directly in contrast to the goals and promises of the CCIF. Instead, that review and disclosure only happened behind closed doors with "large companies" such as Microsoft and IBM. As I made it quite clear on the CCIF newsgroup, regardless of the origin of the document, it is of my opinion that the CCIF as an organization should not endorse any documents without a vote by its members.
So far, it seems the plan is that the CCIF will officially release this document on Monday, prior to the meeting it will hold on Thursday in NYC. I hope that those behind the scenes here realize that the best course of action is to wait until Thursday and secure a vote by members present at that time.
No? (Score:2)
Yes they do. (Score:5, Insightful)
Open Standards never work
So how did you manage to post that?
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Do not feed the trolls, it makes them soggy and hard to light.