A writer on OStatic writes an interesting point. One that I have been pondering for a while since doing some catching up on the emerging trends around cloud computing. If open source is such a win for the cloud computing infrastructure and those that are building apps, why then are we seeing so many proprietary “clouds” which offer no interaction? Federation of clouds is the key to maintaining an edge by ISVs.
A ISV cannot afford to put all of their eggs in one basket. A great example is for those that use Amazon and S3. When S3 went down a few weeks ago everyone using S3 went down with it. Nine hours of downtime for a small company could run it into the ground quickly. The question is how do you prevent outages from affecting your application? Federation would be an answer.
Most cloud computing vendors like Amazon, Google, and others do not interact together at all. If I want to host on Amazon ECS and on Google Apps I am forced to write two different “standards”. While there are open standards that are being built for cloud computing collaboration we need to devise a way to allow cloud users to distribute applications amongst a number of providers. The best providers will stand up and can charge a premium whilst the worst ones will go away (either through acquisition or simple death).
But there is more than simply calling a cloud federated. There are a number of issues that need to be addressed such as authentication, data storage and syncronization, and application communication in addition to being able to run the application in a number of unrelated cloud instances.
Interesting issues. Time to find out more.
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