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."
Too many anaologies in the summary (Score:5, Funny)
But if open-source can hit the bullseye, the rest of the dominoes should fall like a house of cards. Checkmate.
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Re:Too many anaologies in the summary (Score:4, Funny)
For some reason my brain automatically did this:
<Zap_Branigan>
But if open-source can hit the bullseye, the rest of the dominoes should fall like a house of cards. Checkmate.
</Zap_Branigan>
Parent
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And a subtle, suave, sexy reference to Futurama's own Captain Zapp Brannigan.
Crybaby (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Crybaby (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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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.
headline is backwards (Score:5, Insightful)
should be "Cloud computing facing a difficult battle for Relevance"
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but these are *mega* clouds
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Cloud computing is like the net pc. A big deal until everyone realizes is not.
Do we really need a cloud? (Score:2)
Re:Do we really need a cloud? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now you come to mention it, we do already have all that in Windows.
Parent
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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.
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Why do we need this again?
For all the badly written commercial software that's too slow to run on one machine yet too expensive to leave enough budget for a real cluster.
Open source already absolutely relevant (Score:4, Insightful)
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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.
Google App Engine uses Open Source (Score:2)
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"?
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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:OSS also not a big player in cheeseburger marke (Score:2)
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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 exam
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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 'W
Physical hardware is needed here (Score:2)
Unfortunately, this is where OSS is weak. The larger companies (Google, Amazon) can afford the large iron and backend storage stacks [1]. For the uptimes that modern cloud storage has, the equipment costs are tremendous, because the machines that are able to do the large volume I/O over the net not just have to have performance, but be engineered around reliability, and that means large clusters distributed over geographically different regions storing identical data.
I don't really see how an open source
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You can achieve the same level of reliability fairly cheaply, what's expensive is the throughput, which isn't necessary unless you want to support a large number of users, and if you have lots of paying customers you should be able to afford the highend kit.
A cloud is only a base (Score:2)
I don't see how Open Source is not more relevant with the advent of cloud computing - sure no small startup can put up a gigantic server farm, but who cares when what's running on all the servers is open source software, and the services written atop THAT are also using open technologies?
There's plenty of room for a small open source company to add a ton of value atop the raw cloud space. Having so many options means businesses will be grateful to anyone who can cull down the selection to a small set and m
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.
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.
Same old Same old (Score:2)
Take a look around, how many companies from the Dow Jones Industrial Average we
FOSS market should be different (Score:2)
Wrong way round (Score:5, Interesting)
'In a world where horsepower matters more than the software feeding those "horses"...'
Wrong already! Software does the work - the "what" of solving problems. Hardware, while of course necessary too, is basically a fungible commodity - the "how". To use a counter-intuitive but revealing analogy, software is like the car while hardware plays the role of fuel.
Good software is still fairly rare, whereas state-of-the-market hardware can be cheaply and plentifully obtained from several alternative sources. So the article has it exactly the wrong way round: it's software that is important, and hardware that plays the supporting role.
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
Software as a service, how is this not expected? (Score:2)
The higher costs of service versus localized computing has been a known drawback since the beginning. It's part of the drive too, in the expectations of huge profits and / or market-share.
That doesn't mean that open source can't participate, it just means that the big players are the big players. It's not that much of a switch really, money drives a lot of things and "free" does too. I imagine in the drive for domination of the market, the big boys will be clamoring to have other software hook into their cl
Closed platform? (Score:2)
I wonder... (Score:2)
I wonder how many people are willing to pay a 25% premium to run Windows on Amazon EC2?
It may be difficult for any startup, open source or not, to gain a foothold here. But when you're looking to reduce costs as much as possible, to sell a utility computing model, I don't see why you'd be adding extra software costs right away.
In fact, the summary mentions other things, like Puppet and Hadoop, that make an impact.
I don't know that anyone is claiming open source could provide such a service, any more than op
I'm confused (Score:2)
Citizens and nations (Score:2)
This is like saying that a responsible citizen will never be able to replace a nation state, so we might as well give up. You, as an individual, or as an open source project, have a slim chance of replacing Google, or Amazon, or Salesforce. But, through an open source project, you can alter the rules of the game, and you CAN profoundly affect those big companies, how they operate, what work their employees do, what services they offer their customers, etc.
Cloud computing will not be relevant forever (Score:2)
Below some (offtopic) thoughts on why cloud computing may not stay relevant (if it is, right now) into the future.
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?
Open source is not a profit model (Score:2)
The way I see it, cloud computing, at least in its current form, is a business model. It is a buzzword that helps print more money, in lieu of actual innovation. It's the internet's idea of a make-work project.
Open source cliques don't give a flying fuck about business models. Linux wasn't created to satisfy some whiney douchebag on CNet, it was created because it served the needs of a small niche of hackers, and it snowballed from there. The way things are right now, real geeks don't care so much about
P2P Cloud Computing with Open Source (Score:2)
Isn't a p2p cloud via the Internet the obvious solution to open-source's ability to compete with a proprietary cloud in some million square foot warehouse? After all, that warehouse is big and impressive, but the Internet is MUCH bigger and has all sorts of redundancies and local hubs, providing a local granularity to the p2p cloud that a few large warehouses can never match.
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.
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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
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.
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Heh, if the "can only run virtual apps" processor is insufficient to run linux, I will be very surprised. My guess at the requirements for WINDOWS 8 PRO CLASSIC FOR CLOUD would be quintuple quad core at 5.7GHz.
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Cloud computing technologies are NOT about (or only about) big box companies hosting your applications. They are about the ability to host them where ever you want when you want, from big companies to local server farms to *gasp* the user's desktops. The next generation of application after cloud computing will have to do with being able to leverage computing resources anywhere and anytime with automated failover and resource sharing.
You mean like today's bots running on Windows-based botnets?