In reading the article about better security and cooperation for the ‘cloud computing platform’, the most important thing mentioned, a few paragraphs in, is that there is no cloud.
I try to be lenient with people, but when things appear in print, or a phrase pops up into the lexicon, I get peeved when some care is not taken in expressing a concept. We are talking about computing, after all. One of the first things that is learned in programming is precision of parsing. This carries into any pseudocoding that is done, and soon precision in daily speech patterns begins; thus the reason I refer to it as ‘distance computing’.
The article goes a bit further into the hows and whys of the interoperability.
Also featured are some potential problems – or at least bumps in the road.
Last week’s debut of the Open Cloud Manifesto was not without controversy, as Microsoft claimed that an open process was not used to create the document, and that it was asked to sign it without the opportunity to provide feedback or revisions.
But Microsoft later met with companies such as Cisco, IBM and Intel and generally agreed on the importance of cloud computing services being open and interoperable.
Reuven Cohen, the founder and chief technologist for cloud computing start-up Enomaly, and one of the people responsible for bringing the manifesto to the public, is advocating for the creation of an industry association focused on marketing a cohesive picture of what cloud computing is.
While many vendors are still defining cloud computing in different ways, Cohen argues that “we can still compete, but we don’t necessarily have to tell different stories about what the cloud is. There is an opportunity to come together and grow the market.”
How the cloud is defined will be important to limit confusion in the marketplace. Every vendor is using the word “cloud” to suit their own purposes, but the Sys-Con conference last week demonstrated that a common definition is probably not that far away.
As an approach to building IT services, cloud computing harnesses several converging factors in the IT world, including the rapidly increasing horsepower of servers and virtualization technologies that combine many servers into large computing pools and divide single servers into multiple virtual machines that can be spun up and powered down at will.
I can immediately see a problem with there being too many who want to be “chiefs” in a land (the land of clouds) where there needs to be one or two chiefs, and lots of “Indians”. There also appears to be a problem of definitions, and at what point the distance from the user’s computer the “cloud” begins.
Also, the amount of competition will foster problems. It always does.
The article sums up the situation very well, giving us a clue that the bottom line will indeed be the bottom line. Will is be cost effective?
The problem also is being addressed in the academic world, where a standards group called the Open Cloud Consortium is trying to improve the performance of computing clouds spread across geographically disparate data centers and also promote open frameworks that will let clouds operated by different entities work seamlessly together.
Within security there are many issues that must be addressed, according to the Cloud Security Alliance, including compliance and auditing, e-discovery, encryption and key management, identity and access management, disaster recovery, and incident response, notification and remediation.
Ultimately, cloud vendors will be judged on five broad categories: security, scalability, availability, performance and cost-effectiveness, Vogels said. While there are shortcomings today, he predicted huge advancements in the next few years.
“It is still day one,” Vogels said. “We’ve just begun widespread deployment of these services.”
I wonder if this will usher in a new era of what used to be called thin computing.
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