Misconceptions About Federated Clouds

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As I promote the idea of federated clouds (previous CloudAve coverage), there seems to be some misconceptions among readers and other bloggers. I thought I will use this post to clarify these misconceptions. For beginners, please check out this post on the definition of federated cloud ecosystems.

• Federated clouds is pushed as an alternative to market consolidation resulting in handful of cloud providers. It is about increasing the competition in the market.
• Federation can be achieved using both open source and proprietary software. I never pushed federation as an alternative to proprietary software. Rather, proprietary cloud services are part of the federated cloud ecosystems.
• The only argument I have been making (when it comes to emphasizing the need for open source licensing along with open standards) is that open source lowers the barriers for entry to service providers enabling more and more of them to participate in the market. It is not just the case with just the federated clouds, it can happen in any segment where open source software is present. Open source commoditizes the market by lowering the barrier to entry to many players, thereby, pushing the innovation to happen at higher orders. So, federated clouds are not alternative to proprietary clouds.

My definition of federated cloud ecosystems clearly talks about the heterogeneity of the cloud platforms and proprietary cloud infrastructure platforms from VMware, Microsoft, Nimbula, etc. are part of the definition. #justforclarification