The Ideal, Non-Proprietary Cloud

jg21 writes "As previously discussed on Slashdot, the new tendency to speak of 'The Cloud' or 'Cloud Computing' often seems to generate more heat than light, but one familiar industry fault line is becoming clear — those who believe clouds can be proprietary vs. those who believe they should be free. One CEO who sides with open clouds in order that companies can pick and choose from vendors depending on precisely what they need has written a detailed article in which he outlines how, in his opinion, Platform-as-a-Service should work. He identifies nine features of 'an ideal PaaS cloud' including the requirement that 'Developers should be able to interact with the cloud computer, to do business with it, without having to get on the phone with a sales person, or submit a help ticket.' [From the article: 'I think this means that cloud computing companies will, just like banks, begin more and more to "loan" each other infrastructure to handle our own peaks and valleys, But in order for this to happen we'd need the next requirement.']"

Re:renting software ..

[larry bagina]

hiring rackspace is relying on third party technology.

Also - bandwidth for the upload of the jewels

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

And in this day and age, when even medium-sized businesses can be sitting on literally terabytes of data, how are you going to upload all of that data to "The Cloud" so that "The Cloud" can analyze it for you?

Maintaining a constant 10Mbps WAN connection to "The Cloud" would be monstrously expensive, and yet, at 10Mbps = (10 / 8)MBps = 1.25MBps, that means you would need
.

1 terabyte / 1.25MBps
= (1000 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000 bytes) / (1.25 * 1000 * 1000 bytes per second)
= [(1000 * 1000) / 1.25] seconds
= 800,000 seconds
= [800,000 / (60 * 60 * 24)] days
= 9.259 days

just to upload a terabyte of data at WAN speeds of 10Mbps.

So "The Cloud" isn't going to have realtime interactions with your corporate database - "The Cloud" is going to BE your corporate database.

Re:Security?

[Electrum]

Or indeed, mention of anyone, anywhere actually using "cloud computing".

Yeah, no one is actually using [amazon.com] Amazon's EC2.

Re:Security?

[Jick]

There are already great examples of businesses using the cloud to support their infrastructure (Amazon's posterchild being SmugMug.)

One of the major reasons people will migrate is efficiency. In this green-age that we're now in, companies are looking to reduce their individual power requirements while increasing scale. Who can provide cheaper power or more efficient cooling for datacenter? Your on-site NOC or ACME colo? ACME colo, or sunpowered-ocean-cooled-datacenter.com? By making this leap, companies are able to lower their costs, 'at the cost' (har har) of building their applications in a cloud-friendly manner.

There are a few major hurdles left to cross for widespread adoption, but you can see this wave coming from miles away.

Two of those hurdles are reliability and performance. As a business looking to lower costs by switching to cloud-based computing (say Amazon's EC2), I need to know what kind of performance I can get and how reliable the service will be. This information is starting to come out via services like CloudStatus.com [cloudstatus.com] -- which is able to give performance and health metrics on a real-time & historical basis.

You'll definitely see a huge push towards SLAs which will push adoption. The competition is heating up in this space.

// Disclaimer -- I work for Hyperic which wrote CloudStatus