Open Source Facing a Difficult Battle For Cloud Relevance 141
A recent eulogy for open source's relevance to cloud computing by Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady caught the attention of Matt Asay, who breaks down the difficulty of this David and Goliath problem. "In a world where horsepower matters more than the software feeding those 'horses,' in terms of the entry cost to compete, and where big vendors like Amazon and Google are already divvying up the market, the odds of a small-fry, open-source start-up challenging 'Goliath' are slim. It's not a new argument: Nick Carr has been suggesting for some time that only a few, big companies can afford relevance in this hardware-intensive business. Given this fact, O'Grady thinks the best we can hope for (and he thinks it's pretty important) is 'a loose coalition or confederation of [open-source] projects and vendors that will together comprise an increasingly viable top to bottom alternative to some of the cloud providers today.' He includes projects like Puppet (Reductive Labs) and Hadoop in this mix, but is careful to point out that he doesn't see a full-fledged, open-source alternative seriously challenging the closed platforms of Google, Amazon, Salesforce, and the other mega-clouds."
Crybaby (Score:5, Informative)
Battle with what? (Score:5, Informative)
If the article would state that these companies are not giving back much to the community in relation to what they take, then yes, that's probably true but they still rely heavily on OSS software.
For me the whole article completely misses the point, but maybe I'm missing something here.
Also: cloud computing is not going to take over everything. It is useful for certain situations like massive indexing, data backup storage and some forms of HPC (though the last group mostly build their own data centres or rely on distributed computing). The everyday business will not participate much.
Re:OSS also not a big player in cheeseburger marke (Score:3, Informative)
Could Computing [wikipedia.org] is simply a service provided over the Internet that is scalable and virtualized.
In short the software is in the web browser, while the data is stored somewhere else like on the servers. The word "Cloud" is a metaphor for the Internet.
This is not just an ordinary web application, it usually involves a virtual machine of some sort so that the web applications acts like a desktop application within the web browser. One that can be scaled to handle an almost unlimited amount of users.
So for example the PHPBB2 Forum software is a web application, but not a Cloud Computing application. Google apps, on the other hand works via a virtual machine and software as a service so it qualifies for cloud computing applications. Google apps do GMail, Word Processing, Spreadsheet, etc in the web browser under a virtual machine but the data is stored on Google's servers.
The reason why open source developers don't support cloud computing is because they feel that it locks the users into third party technology and exposes their data across the Internet in violation of privacy that others could spy on it or capture it via packet sniffers. So OSS developers try to avoid making cloud computing applications as a matter of personal ethics, etc.
Re:OSS also not a big player in cheeseburger marke (Score:3, Informative)
As with anything, it entirely depends on who you ask.
'Scalable' does seem to be nearly ubiquitous for the concept of what 'cloud computing' means. Virtualization is common, but not a prerequisite.
Your description seems to indicate that a 'virtual machine' in this context is referring to the more application-style of what runs in the browser behaving like an application. By and large, this style of making more extensive use of javascript to give a more 'desktop' feel to web applications is a mark of the 'Web 2.0' buzzword (though the context most widely credited with coining the phrase didn't speak to that at all). When people talk about virtualization in the cloud, they almost always refer to OS instances being executed with a virtualization layer abstracting them from the real hardware (and making some of the more fatal hardware situations appear more like a simple reboot to the os instance, and other imminent failures no problem at all). Some rely on higher-order application-level redundancy, and forgo the virtualization aspects (many of the IO intensive workloads are still very reluctant to embrace virtualization, for one). Others even rely on 'user-level' redundancy (i.e. user sees a problem, hits refresh).
Some think of a cloud as a computing resource in which the usage picture is highly dynamic without strict mappings to where things must happen.
Some think of Cloud as a sort of spiritual successor to 'Thin Client', often extended to the internet. Where Thin clients were almost universally thought of as essentially remote displays, the reinvention in the cloud context generally has a more sophisticated client that is fed data to interpret and manipulate, though it's nearly required that client-side data persistence not be a critical pre-requisite. A total destruction of a 'client' in this definition of cloud has little more permanent consequence than 'thin clients'. I.e., Valve's Steam, where you could throw your computer off the top of a building and theoretically recover all your purchases, and, for the games that support it, the settings you use. In steam, the coupling between client and 'cloud' is relatively loose (some aspects can operate completely offline, and save-games may not fit the definition) , whereas 'google apps' is relatively tight.
phpBB could be considered a 'cloud' application, so could BBSes, so could a lot of things if they came to popularity *right now* instead of when they did. Essentially, most all webapss meet *someone's* definition of cloud, and it's such a vague term with no authority behind it, no one can call them wrong for the most part.
I don't think OSS developers avoid making cloud applications no more than anything else. The actual code behind many cloud computing implementations is OSS (Hadoop for one), but people refer not to the software, but to the popular sites that use the software. OSS is a phenomenon built entirely around how software is designed and produced. By most all definitions of cloud computing, it is a phenomenon that is built entirely around how software is put into implementation, usually with the characteristics that the users don't even know what software they are really using.
As far as OSS goes, cloud computing might actually be easier in that environment. The companies know the value lies in the data being managed moreso than the software used to manage it, and will risk others leveraging more for the sake of outsourcing development costs to a community. However, the philosophy behind OSS, as you say, may naturally lead some to worry about control of their data.
Re:Too many anaologies in the summary (Score:3, Informative)
And a subtle, suave, sexy reference to Futurama's own Captain Zapp Brannigan.