The Ideal, Non-Proprietary Cloud 93
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.']"
Speaking of non-proprietary clouds... (Score:3, Interesting)
The guys at Red Hat have released the first version of a project called Genome genome.et.redhat.com [redhat.com] . This looks to be an open source project that makes Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and CentOS clouds using Xen, KVM, and commodity hardware.
"Proprietary"? (Score:3, Interesting)
The word "proprietary" is a very vague term that's usually used to connote some sort of "them", where the "us" are the good guys.
The bottom line is that wherever there is value, someone will find a way to charge for it. If this "cloud computing" really has no model under which anyone finds it valuable enough to commercialize it, then it's probably not going to be very popular anyway.
Re:Security? (Score:3, Interesting)
Or indeed, mention of anyone, anywhere actually using "cloud computing".
Re:"Proprietary"? (Score:4, Interesting)
Proprietary implies lock-in and monopoly. The opposite is an "open standard" where there can be a competitive market.
Think proprietary = monopoly, open = free market.
Re:Reality? (Score:3, Interesting)
Are you mad?! Vaporware MUST be kept free, or we're all doomed!
Seriously though, yes, "the cloud" paradigm is a myth, but it's a myth much beloved by certain software companies who hope to restore the "balance" of scarcity in the future. So if we actually do get "the cloud", it will almost certainly be proprietary, as that's really the whole point. Of course we probably won't get it, as other than reintroducing scarcity, it serves no realistic purpose. At this time, we don't even have a proper definition for "cloud computing", other than "essential software will no longer be local". How transparent is that?
Re:renting software .. (Score:3, Interesting)
Except that the training required to learn this software is more expensive than the software. It would be cheaper to hire an engineer who had his own tools.
Not really. The top-end CFD codes are really very expensive indeed, and have "interesting" restrictions on use too. (I know of at least one that is considered to be a munition, being greatly useful for designing missile systems.)
It's like when your car breaks - it's cheaper to hire a mechanic than to rent diagnostic computers and other tools the mechanic has and learn about internal combustion engines and how to use the tools you rented.
Except that the focus is on renting to businesses, not consumers. While cloud computing can be made to work with consumers, you typically won't sell it to them "raw", but rather as packaged services that might be paid for directly or through advertising. This whole area of cloud-driven business models is very complex indeed.
Remember, the term "cloud computing" was coined by the clueless who didn't understand the chart's meaning, or he would have simply said "distributed computing".
I should warn you, I work in this field. Cloud computing is more about the space where SOA and grid computing meet, while distributed computing tends to be more about building clusters and stuff like that. The issue is that once you go over the size of a cluster, the overheads of messaging go up massively as you start having to take into account things like security and management (i.e. asshats of all varieties). This means as you move up to the cloud level of conceptual operation you've got to think in terms of breaking your overall processing in different ways. For example, if you were doing drug discovery, you might use a large high-availability cluster (possibly based off a SETI@home-like cycle scavenger) to do the initial search for candidates, and then you'd refine the matches with supercomputing time (using finer and more complex models of molecular interactions) where you know you're not just throwing effort away on a "no hope" option. And that is actually a simple example of what is going to be the case; science and engineering workflows can easily get much more complex, especially when working with multiple datasets with elaborate security requirements (common in medical research). And it's when you consider the effects of this on the way that software vendors work that the whole renting stuff drops out as a way of (probably) increasing the size of market for those guys.
In short, your cynicism is both understandable and laudable, but misplaced.
That's exactly what the NY Times is doing. (Score:3, Interesting)
The NY Times converted [nytimes.com] 4 terabytes / 11 million TIFF based images & articles from their archives in 24 hours using 100 EC2 instances. And continue to do it to this day. Cost? A couple hundred dollars.