IT utilities, the biggest game in town

Hang On!!!

This article whilst interesting seems to have missed some fundamental points and ploughed head long in to prescribing what each vendor must do for world domination.

The biggest point completely avoided is, What is Cloud Computing? The reason its glossed over here and also in the recent Cloud Computing Manifesto document is there are two different competing views.

They all agree its about turning data centers into a virtualised utility computing providers. Where you simply pay for the resources you use and can vary the amount consumed just like turning on a tap. Thats the theory anyway.

The problem is there a two different ways of doing this.

On the one hand you have Google and Microsoft who have proprietary technologies which your infrastructure must be built to use, such as the Big Table DB. They operate on top of the cloud infrastructure.

On the other hand you have Amazon, GridScale and everyone else who seem to just be providing VPS servers, which can be configured automatically to scale out. So if your web site got dugg today just fire up 10 more Instances based on the same original image and all will be well. The problem with this is you need to write or purchase the software to actually do the scalling out.

You have also fundamentally forgotten about the software side of it. Sure we need VMs to manage it, but what images are these VMs going to run. If you read the various Google papers on scaling out its a seriously complex problem. Its also not helped by all the various different vendors each with there own vision and matching API. Ideally we really need one standard to control deployment to the cloud.

Another interesting technology you didn't mention is Eucalyptus, its going to be strong part of the Ubuntu Server cloud play and effectively provides a private Amazon EC2 on your own hardware. And the most important thing is its API is compatible with Amazons. Its still in fairly early stages, although they have just received funding to commercialise it in much the same way XEN did.

Of course many companies don't need to worry about scaling out, since they can happily just run one instance to meet all there needs for that particular service. But then thats really just server visualization with a trendier name and not cloud computing.

The really attractive prospect is mixing the public and private clouds, so you can do disaster recovery to Amazon or simply purchase there service when you really need them and supply the very day base load via your private cloud.