Archive for April 7th, 2009
About the Open Cloud Manifesto
“Arguably, nailing everything down too early may also hamper innovation (…) cloud computing may be the next big thing, but its politics are as old as the mainframe (…) at issue is an Open Cloud Manifesto, which was published on March 30th.”
Read “Clash of the Clouds” on The Economist.
The Open Cloud Manifesto is portrayed as a document intended to initiate a conversation about making cloud computing an open service delivery environment:
“Cloud computing is still in its early stages, with much to learn and more experimentation to come. However, the time is right for the members of the emerging cloud computing community to come together around the notion of an open cloud.”
The 6 page document acknowledges the fact that the concept of cloud computing relates to miscellaneous technologies such as: grid computing, SOA (service oriented architecture), and 2.0 services and that the industry is still working on figuring out where all of that is headed.
What appears to be a bit clearer is an initial focus on the so-called utility business model. This means that cloud computing customers pay more or less depending on what level of data storage, application hosting and/or bandwidth consumption they need when they need it, just to name a few examples of “metered” models. In other words, on demand computing resources have become an online service which relies on ubiquitous broadband access.
Enterprise CIOs might like the fact that, under this model, the burden of scaling, updating and upgrading data centers falls with the provider of the cloud computing service, who can in turn leverage economies of scale as the same infrastructure is shared by more than one customer. One could think of a virtuous feedback loop which would make access to computing infrastructure more and more affordable, thus further democratizing ICT, information and communication technologies.
Business wise, CIOs get to shift a formerly fixed cost (capex) to a variable cost model (opex). Being this about outsourcing a service, provider selection becomes subject to cost/feature comparisons and competitive bidding in some cases. Down the road, the question is how feasible it will be to switch cloud computing providers to be able to benefit from newer and better services and/or cost efficiencies. To that end, the manifesto states that:
“Cloud providers must not use their market position to lock customers into their particular platforms and limit their choice of providers”
Even though my previous comments focused on what’s in it for CIOs, the fact is that there is a mass market out there as our lifestyles involve a growing a variety of digital media, services and devices (phones, laptops, PCs, TVs, etc.) that would perform better when being able to get you your content, applications and services anytime and anywhere. Apple’s MobileMe would be an early example. The same dilemma applies to consumers pondering what it would take them to switch “utilities” at some point. Interestingly enough, telcos providing personal storage services experience higher levels of customer loyalty.
By the way, key leading cloud computing players such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Saleforce happen to be absent from the list of the manifesto’s supporters which features the following companies:
- Akamai, AMD, Aptana, AT&T Corp., Boomi, Cast lron, Cisco, CSC, The Eclipse Foundation, Elastra, EMC, EngineYard, Enomaly, F5, GoGrid, Hyperic, IBM, Juniper, LongJump, North Carolina State University, Nirvanix, Novell, Object Management Group, Open Cloud Consortium (OCC), Rackspace, Red Hat, The Reservoir Project, RightScale, rPath, SAP, SOASTA, Sogeti, Sun Microsystems, Telefónica, The Open Group, VMWare
J. de Francisco. Chicago, April 7
