Friday, 9 January 2009
The first cloud in 2009
I like this post by Scott Lowe who is a first class Virtualisation evangelist http://blog.scottlowe.org/2009/01/09/a-quick-thought-regarding-cloud-computing/
This is exactly one of the valid points that the media and vendors fail to tell the CIO's and CTO's about the fluffy fluffy cloud when they are touting what the cloud can offer and how it will revolutionise the way we do IT today.
Ok its starting with initiatives such as http://www.opencloudconsortium.org/index.html , but currently no defined standards exist as to how cloud vendors can talk and interact together, and how individual cloud (or more the case hosting) companies define standards within each supporting stack of there own as we all try and guess. They also have no defined standard to ensure that you as the customer can ensure you can migrate your stack between hosting...sorry cloud companies when your agreement is up and you've had enough.
All of the infrastructure components that Scott mentions follow standards to communicate and inter opt together and they are all established and mostly commoditised within the datacenter, the vendors all strive to better rival technology but the baseline standard and building block defined within each individuals stack is pretty much stable which is why people rely on them to run their business. They also most importantly make sure they actually talk to other components because if they didnt I think its easy to work out what would happen to both the vendor and us!
If the new emerging cloud industry doesn't start to build the standards around its infrastructure that exist as they do in the shape and form today on standard infrastructure then I'm afraid it's going absolutely nowhere for a long time until it does. Maybe when cloud does start to gain these standards and interoperability it will become more clunky and inflexible which is one if not the main key selling points of the technology.
This is exactly one of the valid points that the media and vendors fail to tell the CIO's and CTO's about the fluffy fluffy cloud when they are touting what the cloud can offer and how it will revolutionise the way we do IT today.
Ok its starting with initiatives such as http://www.opencloudconsortium.org/index.html , but currently no defined standards exist as to how cloud vendors can talk and interact together, and how individual cloud (or more the case hosting) companies define standards within each supporting stack of there own as we all try and guess. They also have no defined standard to ensure that you as the customer can ensure you can migrate your stack between hosting...sorry cloud companies when your agreement is up and you've had enough.
All of the infrastructure components that Scott mentions follow standards to communicate and inter opt together and they are all established and mostly commoditised within the datacenter, the vendors all strive to better rival technology but the baseline standard and building block defined within each individuals stack is pretty much stable which is why people rely on them to run their business. They also most importantly make sure they actually talk to other components because if they didnt I think its easy to work out what would happen to both the vendor and us!
If the new emerging cloud industry doesn't start to build the standards around its infrastructure that exist as they do in the shape and form today on standard infrastructure then I'm afraid it's going absolutely nowhere for a long time until it does. Maybe when cloud does start to gain these standards and interoperability it will become more clunky and inflexible which is one if not the main key selling points of the technology.
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