back to article What's an open cloud? The Manifesto's not telling

"What exactly is an open cloud?" you ask. You won't find an answer in the Open Cloud Manifesto. IBM's much-discussed Microsoft-baiting Manifesto urges "the members of the emerging cloud computing community to come together around the notion of an open cloud." But in the end, the notion amounts to little more than a few …

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  1. jake Silver badge

    Enough.

    "The best they can do is narrow things down to all whatchamacallits that exhibit "the ability to scale and provision computing power dynamically in a cost efficient way" and provide "the ability of the consumer (end user, organization or IT staff) to make the most of that power without having to manage the underlying complexity of the technology.""

    Oh. So "cloud computing" is UN*X-type machines interconnected with TCP/IP, then? Seems to me we already have that installed, and pretty much world-wide ...

    Although I kind of question why they think the IT staff shouldn't need to understand the underlying complexity of the technology. I get the fact that IT is overhead and not a profit center, but if IT doesn't understand how all the bits of kit fit together, who does? Management?

    Never mind. "Cloud Computing" is management-speak for "I don't understand it, and it costs money, so let's try to get some other department to pay for it".

    Enough about "cloud computing" already. Lets move on.

  2. Henry Wertz Gold badge

    EC2 has one thing going for it

    Well, Amazon EC2 is ahead in one respect -- it's good for standards to have more than one implementation.

    I was rather mortified when I read about Shuttlesworth talk about adding cloud stuff to Ubuntu.. given the general overhype of it all. They are using Eucalyptus, this provides EC2 functionality on your own boxes. (Eucalyptus is developed at University of California Santa Barbara). So EC2, it simply runs Xen virtual machines, gives you a /dev/sda with your image on it, /dev/sdb with temp storage and /dev/sdc with swap space. They charge per hour, for disk use, and for network transfer. Eucalyptus is using Rocks cluster management and Xen. Apparently, in Ubuntu 9.04 you can add an (explictily unsupported) copy of Eucalyptus and try it out, and they plan to have it fully supported in 9.10 (about six or seven months from now.)

    It sounds like Eucalyptus is virtually identical to EC2 for normal use, main things being no support for billing, and they honestly admit Amazon's implementation is probably more optimized.

  3. amanfromMars Silver badge

    On ITs Way ......... WAI Traffic Control

    So the long and the short of it is that Microsoft Azure and Google App Engine both need Drivers for their Cloud and Amazon needs an Application.

    In other words, all three are looking for the NXXXXT Best Thing ...the Nexus of the Matrix to Champion/Lead with/Rule Magnificently with?

    Ok .... so what's IT worth?

  4. Toastan Buttar
    Unhappy

    Checking date

    It's a sad day when you need to check to see if the Open Cloud Manifesto is actually an April Fool or not. (Turns out they're serious !)

  5. jonathan
    Paris Hilton

    How about...

    How about companies like FlexiScale, GoGrid, AWS - the infrastructure providers in short, correlate their APIs to be compatible? If the compute resources simply appear as dedicated servers and all provide the same OS (CentOS for example), then matching APIs mean that you have the open movement everyone is looking for...

    Paris, cuz she "likes" everyone, much like the open cloud...

  6. amanfromMars Silver badge

    Open Cloud Manifesto must also have a Lead Opinion/QuITe Wwwonderful CViews

    "It's a sad day when you need to check to see if the Open Cloud Manifesto is actually an April Fool or not. (Turns out they're serious !)" ...... By Toastan Buttar Posted Wednesday 1st April 2009 07:29 GMT

    Of course, it's serious, TB, and about just as likely to Follow/Mimic the Bankers Open Manifesto Model. ...... for whenever you know the Power which Control of the Cloud Provides/ITs Currency, what do you Think the Chances of Bankers Relinquishing and Sharing their Controls of their Wealth Supply are? Well that is much the same as that which will happen in Cloud Systems, with a just a handful of Major Virtualisation Players leading all into Games in whatever Attractive Direction they decide.

    Or would you disagree but I don't think calling for AI Groupie Meeting will solve anything other than letting everyone know that you don't know what the Cloud is all about and what IT can do and is doing.

    There is one Great Thing about ITs Strata though ..... they are Real Fussy about who are allowed on them to Play with Words of Missive Description, given the Massive Damage that they can so easily XXXXTraOrdinarily Render.

  7. Glenn Charles
    Paris Hilton

    open cloud

    So why don't they do my thinking for me?

    ...Then again, I do read the Register.

    --Glenn

    8]

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