Specifying a cloud computer

A response David Young's call to action on cloud computing. This entry is based on a Cloud Computing list.

I think there are a number of assumptions here that are worth
discussing, and I think it's great that David brought them up.

Firstly, as James posted on the list, there's a wide variety of "clouds" out there, from black boxes that support web applications like AppEngine, to CohesiveFT's stack deployers on EC2, to Elastra's scalable database on demand. Not all of them expose instances. Certainly it would help to have a standard for the providers that DO expose instances, I just don't think it covers the market. Wasn't this the point of the Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) from VMWare, Xen, etc? [ Of course, it's yet not ratified by the DMTF to my knowledge. Oh, and also, DMTF... not exactly a well known standards body, yet. ]

Secondly, on to the specifics:

"Cloud computers must operate on some sort of virtualization
technology for many of the following features to even be feasible."

Really? Why can't it just work on pre-installed capacity? Blade arrays have been doing this for many years. Certainly virtualization is important long term, but, in the open
systems world at least, it's still _very_ new in the data centre. What happens if enterprises just aren't ready to adopt VMWare or Xen for a variety of technical or political reasons? To paraphrase what one person here asked, "will you trust your hypervisor more than your OS?"

"Application Layer Interoperability"

It'll be interesting to see if user-packaging standards start to form here, like WAR files. Or wouldn't a tarball be enough for many of these frameworks?

"State Layer Interoperability"

There are billions of dollars thrown at interoperability, semantics, and integration annually by both vendors and customers, flowing like a river into a tarpit of epic proportions. A large neon sign hangs over this tarpit that says "Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here.", obfuscated by an even larger fireworks display that spells "A-G-I-L-I-T-Y".

There is some hope, of course - cue talk of the Semantic Web. It's
still too soon to tell what pieces remain to make it work, but a standard XMPP-based information bus is probably low on the list of priorities -- it's too specific a solution. (The technical challenges in financial markets don't apply to every industry). I'd say data model interoperability probably is a more important nut to crack.

"Application Services"

Yup, I agree here. But It'll be hard-fought street fighting to get the standards in place over the next few years.

Automatic Scale (deploy and forget about it)

Funny, I keep looking for the "fast=true" parameter in my infrastructure, and I still haven't found it.

Joking aside, I do agree that 'adding & removing resources on demand' should be a feature of how one provisions cloud infrastructure. (Not coincidentally, that's one of Elastra's features in our preview release). Though I'll go back to our conversation on performance management a couple of weeks ago: many times, the best way to scale
is to fix the application.

Barring that, the cloud would have to detect and rewrite the developer's shitty code for them. This isn't completely out of the question -- recent Oracle releases can rewrite a developers' SQL to perform better, and a DBA can choose to "swizzle" the statement at
runtime without requiring a code change. They added this feature so shops could workaround the crappy code in many packaged applications that somehow never seem to be fixed.

Hardware Load Balancing

This seems very much aimed at web application hosting. While clearly important, that would be pretty limiting, especially if we're trying to shift the enterprise onto the cloud. I'd go further and suggest that the network capacity and (virtual) topology itself needs to be a cloud service.

Storage as a Service

WebDAV?! Why not AtomPub?

On another note, has anyone seriously considered iSCSI? Certainly we can't think of storage just as web resources -- there also need to be mount points as a service, like Amazon EBS. Or is this just a pipe dream?