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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.
- Infinite Scalability
- High Reliability with uptime running much closer to 100% than those offered
by single providers - No vendor lock-in
- Democratization of Clouds with no monopoly. Even a small business can become
a Cloud provider - High level of customization for enterprises
- Efficient disaster recovery (Thanks to the commenter Venkks for pointing out this miss)
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.
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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.