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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
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.
