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."
headline is backwards (Score:5, Insightful)
should be "Cloud computing facing a difficult battle for Relevance"
Open source already absolutely relevant (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Do we really need a cloud? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now you come to mention it, we do already have all that in Windows.
OSS also not a big player in cheeseburger market. (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe I'm missing something big here, but isn't "cloud computing" largely just a data delivery service, and not really "software"? It's kind of hard to get a handle on "cloud computing" since it's such an amorphous buzzword. Can someone give me a real example of an application that's "cloud computing" based. I thought my little weather app telling me the temperature might be defined as "cloud computing".
If the above is true, I don't see how OSS can really make some big impact on "cloud computing" any more than it can make it on websites. If it's not true, how could OSS big a big player in "cloud computing"?
Free software not relevant? (Score:3, Insightful)
The other issue here is market leadership and time-to-market. Admittedly this speed is somewhat lacking the free software world because the motivations are different but in the long run, free software will win out as it allows more of the best minds to collaborate to build better systems. I'm looking forward to a user/customer owned coop cloud solution and perhaps another one that consists of ready-to-download virtual machines that I can run on my own hardware wherever it may be. A project called Eucalyptus is a step in the right direction in this space.
Some of these network services are starting with the right ethics in mind and it's those we should be talking up. With identi.ca, libre.fm, Eucalyptus and other projects making progress each day, free software(not open source) is anything but dead.
Re:OSS also not a big player in cheeseburger marke (Score:3, Insightful)
That is called FUD. Get the current buzzword related to technology, and just go and make like the OO movement is off the hook on it.
Re:Do we really need a cloud? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Cloud" has been, in many venues, too narrowly defined as being "outsourcing to someone else's cloud", when in fact if you already have an IT department that already manages your servers in house, you can probably get more bang for your buck building your own cloud and converting your existing servers to virtual machines running on it.
It's also incredibly dangerous to say the amount of horsepower you have is the most important thing for cloud computing. The most important part of the cloud is the automation and management software. If either of those two things are inadequate, the cloud will be inadequate and very expensive to maintain. The software is the key to a successful cloud implementation. The end result of a successful cloud implementation should be more efficient use of hardware and more efficient and easier administration, resulting in an overall reduction in cost. If the software pieces aren't in place, you won't reach those goals.
Clouds are not the whole of computing (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd suggest that they are likely to grow to being an important part of computing, but no bigger than, for example, the large-server-and-Oracle part. (full disclosure: I'm a capacity planner, so most of my income comes from just that part).
The disadvantage is that my cost per transaction is greater than if I had a steady load and ran my own machine room. The fees I and the other customers pay a cloud service have to cover their whole machine room, whether it's it's busy or not, plus their profit.
So I see a natural evolution for a growing business. While they're small, they'll build a LAMP or Java stack on a small machine in the back room. If they grow slowly and steadily, they'll buy more, larger machines for the back room. If they grow without bound, they'll jump to LAMP-on-cloud or Java-on-a-cloud, with a few code changes as possible.
Once they have mastered that, they'll move back and forth, depending on the business growth rate. If they grow too fast, they'll do a lot in the cloud. If they grow slowly, they'll have a cloud presence, but try to process as much in their own machine room as they can, to improve the profit margins, using the cloud for overflow and to run during my machine-room upgrade.
Conclusion? common software between the cloud and the machine-room is important. Look for any standards developing in the LAMP/SAMP space, like the DMTF incubator at http://www.dmtf.org/about/cloud-incubator [dmtf.org] Look for Java offerings for business, like http://blogs.sun.com/cloud/entry/communityone_cloud_recap [sun.com] When you're there, specifically look for virtual machines that will run in the cloud. Finally, look for load-balancing mechanisms that will send your work to two different places, under your control, sometimes called "application distributors".
Don't assume open source is at a disadvantage: if you can run your stack on a free VM on a standard-conforming cloud, however commercial it might be, then your computing can remain free of the control of others.
--dave
Re:Salesforce is Software not Hardware (Score:2, Insightful)
This is wholly misleading.
Salesforce is crap, there are more competitive alternatives and most people avoid it like the plague. See Siebel for an easy example. Not to mention most people dont' want to have to a: rely on salesforce or b: give up the control that enterprise can and should have.
This is one reason cloud as a concept fails: lack of enterprise control. It has minimal enterprise interest for this reason. Also add a lack of legal certainty as to apps hosted in the cloud and you have something most corporations will not touch with a 100 ft pole, let alone a 20 footer.
Re:Crybaby (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Salesforce is Software not Hardware (Score:4, Insightful)
Cloud computing is in essence one step worse than proprietary software, in that not only is your data locked up in proprietary formats but it's now hosted on someone else's servers too, making you even more dependent on the service provider.
On the other hand, unlike software, they are providing a service with contracts guarantees... I would demand a guarantee of a certain level of uptime, and a guarantee that i can always take my data out in a standard format if i want/need to. Very few proprietary software guarantees you the ability to retain your data in a standard format that can be imported into a competing product or service.
Is there evidence that Nick Carr knows anything? (Score:3, Insightful)
Is Nick Carr just some academician who spins crazy theories just to get attention, and maybe make some money?
He seem almost like a professional troll, with sensationalist, often inflammatory, subject lines like "is google making us stupid."
Is there any reason to assume that Nick Carr knows any more about the future of IT than the average bum on the street? Okay, he's educated, since when have whack-job college educated predictors ever proven to be more accurate than flipping a coin?
Re:headline is backwards (Score:3, Insightful)
Cloud computing is like the net pc. A big deal until everyone realizes is not.
Re:Crybaby (Score:3, Insightful)
Since when is the point of open source was to kill big companies. That sounds like the sort of thing MS would say ("its communist").
Surely Google, Amazon and others use open source, so we are talking about one open source vendor based platform competing against another. The question then becomes, can open source somehow magically make the economies of scale involved in running infrastructure disappear, at which point the question answers itself.
really? (Score:3, Insightful)
As far as I can tell, open source and Linux are being used far more widely in cloud computing than in corporate America. Cloud computing is going to be a cut-throat business, and it will be tough for companies like Microsoft to compete. Few of their usual dirty tricks work. And the cost of switching is low.
Re:Open source already absolutely relevant (Score:3, Insightful)
Yep; I'm a sysadmin at Rackspace, and interact regularly with our Cloud infrastructure. Without going into detail, we're a Redhat shop. The framework is all proprietary; and that's what the article is talking about - there's not a (good) open cloud framework. But, it wouldn't be possible without open source at the foundation.