UC Berkeley Lab Examines Cloud Computing Obstacles 58
alphadogg writes "UC Berkeley researchers have outlined their view of cloud computing, which they say has great opportunity to exploit unprecedented IT resources if vendors can overcome a litany of obstacles. 'We argue that the construction and operation of extremely large-scale, commodity-computer data centers at low-cost locations was the key necessary enabler of Cloud Computing,' The paper outlines 10 obstacles to cloud computing [PDF]."
Vaporware Alert (Score:5, Insightful)
RTFA (Score:3, Insightful)
From the article's 'Executive Summary':
"Moreover, companies with large batch-oriented tasks can get results as quickly as their programs can scale, since using 1000 servers for one hour costs no more than using one server for 1000 hours."
Is that a given? Is it that simple? I think that statement assumes too much...
As an example, it assumes all servers are operating on the same grid, in the same environment. Last time I checked, the cloud was the epitome of vagary.
Re:RTFA (Score:2, Insightful)
Is that a given? Is it that simple? I think that statement assumes too much...
Nonsense. The Cloud has spoken. Blessed be the Puffies of the Cloud.
Last time I checked, the cloud was the epitome of vagary.
Which means you have no evidence to cast doubts and aspersions. Silence, Infidel! The Cloud has spoken! Blessed be!
OK, that was over the top.
Really, this is just another cycle of "$TECHNOLOGY_I_AM_SELLING is the GAME CHANGER that will SAVE THE WORLD!!!!!111one" I've been in IT 25 years. This repetitiveness is just boring now.
What Vaporware? (Score:3, Insightful)
Cloud Computing is far from vaporware. Or are you suggesting Google & Amazon are fly-by-night operations that might nuke your data on their way out the door?
As long as you're willing to accept certain compromises, Cloud Computing can be the best thing ever.
Only a few considerations (Score:4, Insightful)
All the analysis in the world on cloud computing boils down to a simple fact -- someone else owns your infrastructure and data. If you want to go down this road, your company has to answer these questions:
- Are we comfortable with letting someone else have our data, if they promise not to let it get stolen or use it themselves? Do we really trust that promise?
- Contracts and SLAs are all important, but will getting a payment or free service from a vendor for a 5-hour outage make up for all the lost business? If not, how big does that payout need to be?
- Is the vendor really competent enough to handle the service you're outsourcing to them? Vendors have been known to hire the lowest-possible-cost staff to manage things like this...
- How easy is it to get your data back if you want to leave? Are you stuck with the vendor forever?
- If any sort of app deployment is involved, is your dev, QA and engineering organization good enough so that rolling out to production isn't a messy "oops, let's fix that by manually tweaking the system while it's running" scenario? Vendors generally don't let you do that.
I think the concept really works well for commodity stuff like mail hosting. Whether you trust core business apps to the cloud really depends on your comfort level!
They forgot operational transparency (Score:5, Insightful)
The list:
1 Availability of Service
2 Data Lock-In
3 Data Conïdentiality and Auditability
4 Data Transfer Bottlenecks
5 Performance Unpredictability
6 Scalable Storage
7 Bugs in Large Distributed Systems
8 Scaling Quickly
9 Reputation Fate Sharing
10 Software Licensing
I'm surprised they don't mention my biggest pet peeve with cloud services: lack of operational transparency. You don't know who the admins are, what their policies are, and what code they are using to operate the system.
It's a big black box and you're just supposed to trust that Amazon (or whoever) has sound policies, peer-reviewed code, and a reasonable level of accountability built-in. That's a bit like trusting your bank to only make good loans.
I actually want to know who the admins are. I want to see the code. I want to read the policies. Is that so wrong?
Re:Vaporware Alert (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you trust your data being up in the "cloud"?
Why not? Is it any worse than trusting your data being in the datacenter? As long as you have good backups and a good disaster recovery plan, who cares where your data sits? As long as the company whose servers the data is sitting on have appropriate SLAs that say how the data and access to the data will be protected and to what extent, how, etc., is that any different from the SLA you have with your IT department?
Re:RTFA (Score:5, Insightful)
Nonsense! I'm starting to get tired of all this "last time I checked" bullshit. You NEVER checked. My aggression is not leveled at you necessarily, but at all of the Slashdot posters who bring up the same arguments every time there is a cloud computing story.
The truth is, Amazon's offering (for EXAMPLE), lets you start up multiple virtual machine instances, and you pay per minute per instance. Lots of (NOT ALL) academic and industrial research relies on running many independent experiments. Let's try algorithm X with parameter set [1...100]. If each parameter set takes an hour, then you can either invest 100 hours on 1 machine, or 1 hour on a 100 machines. Aside from a tiny bit of overhead to create scripts to start the virtual instances and upload the jobs, this works exactly as advertised. It is great for some of us, and it's that simple.
Re:Vaporware Alert (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you trust yourself to handle the company information and backups and data storage... If so is that you full time or near full time job.
Secondly if you company is going to go to cloud computer you should be smart enough to create part of the contract the ability to get your data at request even after service has ended for a period of time.
Oddly enough a piece of paper with a couple of signatures on it works better then any technical solution.
Your argument is the same as people who are afraid to fly. The fact that your fate is in someone else hands even if it is statically safer, you feel more comfortable when you are in control.
Re:They forgot operational transparency (Score:3, Insightful)
Nobody with any sense expects their bank to only make good loans - as doing so requires a fully functional crystal to determine who'll lose their job, what company will suffer a massive setback, etc.. etc.. over the life of the loan. What you do reasonably expect is for the proportion of bad loans to be minor in relation to the proportion of good loans.
Okay, it's a buzzword (Score:5, Insightful)
Every time a story mentions the "cloud", we get to enjoy many complaints about the use of this buzzword. I think it's time to accept it. It is a useful term, describing a trend which is only going to grow over time. Having a concise way to refer to it will be convenient, regardless of what you think of the trend.
When people started talking about the "web", did you complain about this buzzword too? After all, it's nothing but a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. Why not just say that every time?
I love watching people reinvent the Mainframe! (Score:4, Insightful)
Since then we've been trying to find the best way to split the load between local and remote intelligence, distributing processing across communications, whether it's for business applications or multiplayer games. And most important, we have found that one solution does not fit all problems. Sometimes distributed knowledge addresses the problem or enables a brand new activity (like the multiplayer games); sometimes close direct access offers the most speed or best function (like Google's massive data centers).
So now, after we can put multi-gigahertz multi-core processors and gigabytes of RAM and terabytes of storage at the disposal of each individual, people are reinventing the remote mainframe. Call it a server, call it a cloud, whatever.
It is to laugh.
Those who will not learn from history are doomed to rediscover lots of things at their own cost.
Re:They forgot operational transparency (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah it is. A cloud service requires more trust in one provider but offers far more efficiency than requiring trust in multiple providers (e.g. my colo, cisco, netapp,redhat,etc..) A successful business has to be able to balance mitigating risk with trusting providers.
So.. while you are interviewing admins and auditing code everyone else is busy making money. Guess who is still in business in 5 years?