Pensieri di un lunatico minore

Square clouds

Yesterday, James Governor posited the fifteen rules of cloud computing, or at least something that might be interpreted as such by many people. It’s not a lot deeper an inspection of the issues than one David Letterman might use, but it is an interesting point of departure for discussion. Since I’ve been doing some cloud/grid/fog/whatever work for the past year, I figured I might add my inflation adjusted two cents.

I am going to use these out of order, since I want to discuss certain sets together.

• If you peel back the label and its says “Grid” or “OGSA” underneath… its not a cloud.
• If you need to send a 40 page requirements document to the vendor then… it is not cloud.
• If there is a consultant in the room… its not a cloud.
• If there is no API… its not a cloud.

I’ve lumped all of these together, because they seem to me to talk about complexity. The term “grid” is highly overloaded and often means different things to different people in different contexts. To me, the biggest difference between a grid and a cloud is that a grid is designed around a specific application domain (i.e. high performance computing), and the cloud is an abstract utility. You could build a grid on top of a cloud, I guess I’m saying.

I don’t disagree prima facia with this argument, though I don’t think the presence of a consultant is a “smell”, but rather whether you have to have one.

• If you need to install software to use it… its not a cloud.
• If you can’t buy it on your personal credit card… it is not a cloud

Well, as some people have pointed out, a lot of us can’t buy it on our personal credit cards, depending on the application, but I think the spirit is that the barrier of entry, financially and otherwise, should be effectively zero. Amazon has done this. Whatever I use, I can just have billed to my card monthly. A few pennies here, a dollar there. The final application of micropayments in some ways.

• If they are trying to sell you hardware… its not a cloud.

OK, that’s obvious. A cloud is service.

• If you need to rearchitect your systems for it… Its not a cloud.

Well, that’s not really fair. Sure you could deploy it as is onto a cloud, but that doesn’t mean it’d work, be reliable, or otherwise take advantage of what a cloud is about: elastic scalability. Amazon is probably the prototypical “cloud service”, but you do have to rethink a lot of things if you want it to be bullet proof. These aren’t necessarily things you don’t have to worry about normally, just things that most people don’t worry about normally.

• If it takes more than ten minutes to provision… its not a cloud.
• If you can’t deprovision in less than ten minutes… its not a cloud.
• If you need to specify the number of machines you want upfront… its not a cloud.

Elasticity. That’d be the key. With Amazon, I can bring servers on and offline quickly. In fact, I’ve had to develop some approaches to hysteresis to reduce the volatility of the systems. This is actually not unlike any form of dynamic capacity management, but as in my previous comment, it’s simply something largely ignored in the past.

• If you know where the machines are… its not a cloud.
• If you can’t connect to it from your own machine… its not a cloud.
• If you own all the hardware… its not a cloud.

They’re in a data center? Seriously though, I do need to know roughly where the machines are. For example, I might want to store some of my data in the US and some in Europe (see European privacy laws), or I might want to serve my Japanese customers out of a local asian facility, rather than dragging it across the transpacific fiber. What I think might be more accurate is that you can’t reach out and touch your machines, no matter what.

Think of it like the electric company. I know sorta where some of my power comes from, but I can’t know exactly, and they certainly won’t let me go in and touch the shiny buttons and colorful dials. I can, however, contract with them for certain constraints on the creation of my energy, abstractly, by requiring that it be green energy.

• If it only runs one operating system… its not a cloud.

Well, this seems a bit silly. For better or worse, the cloud world has consolidated on the Linux environment. Do I wish I could get FreeBSD? Sure, and I’m sure a lot of people would, for some inexplicable reason, like to run Windows, but Linux has become the de facto option, and I don’t think that’s likely to change. It’s not economically viable to support lots of options for most organizations.

Not a bad start, but I think we need to look at the bigger issues, and less at the implementation.