An Open Federated model of cloud architecture will also help to handle Disaster Recovery scenarios.
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Last week, Sun Microsystems announced their Cloud Computing plans. I spent some time thinking about their offerings and its impact on Cloud Computing. If we remove the chatter around the rumored IBM’s acquisition of Sun and proceed with the assumption that Sun remains an independent entity, I get some good vibes about this announcement. Let me try to channel my thoughts in a coherent way in this post.
As Cloud Computing gets more popular and as more and more enterprises move towards clouds, doubts are being raised about the scalability and reliability of single provider clouds. In spite of the “low costs” involved in building datacenters, a single provider may not be able to offer infinite scalability. Add to it, the reliability issue associated with putting all eggs in one basket. We are now faced with a dilemma of whether Cloud Computing can stand up to the demands of the future. The solution to this problem lies in the idea of Open Federated Clouds.
The idea is to create an ecosystem where the technological capabilities are federated to different vendors. Such a federation requires interoperability to be the key factor. For example, an organization should be able to tap into Amazon EC2, Go Grid, etc. for computing power, S3, Rackspace's Cloudfiles, etc. for storage, SimpleDB or some future relational database on the Clouds for database requirements, etc.. In fact, this ecosystem can consist of public as well as private clouds (cloud like architecture inside of company's firewall).
The advantages of Open Federated Clouds, an ecosystem of disparate cloud vendors interoperating with one another, are many. I will list some of them below.
The idea of Federated Clouds is not new. Many people have promoted this idea including Tim O' Reilly in his post last year.
Take note: All of the platform as a service plays, from Amazon's S3 and EC2 and Google's AppEngine to Salesforce's force.com -- not to mention Facebook's social networking platform -- have a lot more in common with AOL than they do with internet services as we've known them over the past decade and a half. Will we have to spend a decade backtracking from centralized approaches? The interoperable internet should be the platform, not any one vendor's private preserve. (Neil McAllister provides a look at just how one-sided most platform as a service contracts are.)
So here's my first piece of advice: if you care about open source for the cloud, build on services that are designed to be federated rather than centralized. Architecture trumps licensing any time.
More specifically, we believe that to truly fulfill the promise of cloud computing, there
should be technological capabilities to federate disparate data centers, including those owned by
separate organizations. Only through federation and interoperability can infrastructure providers
take advantage of their aggregated capabilities to provide a seemingly infinite service computing
utility. Informally, we refer to the infrastructure that supports this paradigm as a federated cloud.
In fact, when Sun made their announcement last week, the first thing that struck me was it was a good step in the right direction. With their emphasis on openness and interoperability, they are helping the idea of Federated Clouds. If we do not push for this idea of Open Federated Clouds, we will end up with a monopoly of one or two providers in the infrastructure space. Such a monopoly goes against the open federated structure of the internet. The very foundation of Cloud Computing is on top of the internet and it is only natural to take the same open federated structure to Cloud Computing also. In this sense, the announcement of Sun Microsystems is exciting and I hope they follow through on their promise. This announcement should serve as a wake up call to other vendors too. If they don't embrace the idea of openness, they will end up losing in this new world where the idea of interoperability and dataportability are already intertwined with the consciousness of the users.
An Open Federated model of cloud architecture will also help to handle Disaster Recovery scenarios.
True. Glad you brought it up. I missed it when I was writing this post.
Interesting. Looks to me it all depends on how you look at different clouds - as infrastructure providers or as software platforms. The former case is roughly similar to buying Internet connectivity for your office from 2 different ISPs for redundancy. The latter case, however, is roughly similar to a process of selecting platform for a project - say between Weblogic and JBoss. For a new project, a single platform is usually selected - I don't think there are many cases when an app is built on top of both for better resiliency or to increase capacity (even though I admit that it's not impossible). In both cases, products are very similar or nearly identical to a certain extent, but the way you look at them makes you select 2 in one case and only 1 in another. Right now, I think choosing a cloud is akin to selecting a software platform. So one will choose only one. However, the future may very well change this trend like you said, especially as interop gets better and each cloud gets its strengths and weaknesses better defined.
[..] that the future of Cloud Computing is an ecosystem ofopen federated clouds. The world is very diverse and "decentralized" and the most important invention after wheel, the internet, is also decentralized and open. So, in my opinion, the technology that is developed on top of the internet catering to the diverse world should be federated and open. Such an open federated system implies that we will see infrastructure built on many different countries by many different vendors with their services talking to one another. Slowly, we are hearing news about infrastructure that are planned or built by Cloud vendors in many different countries. [..]
[..] Cross Posted atCloud Ave. [..]
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