Microsoft's and Amazon's Cloud Strategies Face Open Source Challenges
by Sam Dean - Jul. 15, 2009Comments (1)- Related Blog Posts
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Microsoft has announced pricing for the components of its Azure cloud computing platform, as GigaOm reports, and you can watch a video about Azure here. As expected, consumption-based computing costs are slightly lower than Amazon's costs, but, as The Register reports, Amazon's Linux-based service undercuts Microsoft's Windows pricing.
Microsoft will charge $0.12 per compute hour for its Windows Azure Compute offering, while Amazon's price for a Windows-based compute hour is $0.125. However, Amazon's Linux-based offering is $0.10 per computing hour, and it also charges slightly less for storage than Microsoft. There are many analyses going on around the web about how these pricing strategies will play out over time, but I think the differences in pricing are actually very incremental, and the most interesting cloud computing players to watch are pursuing flexible open source strategies.
We've reported before on Eucalyptus Systems, which is providing support and services for the Eucalyptus cloud software framework. The framework is an open source (under a FreeBSD-style license) infrastructure for cloud computing on clusters that duplicates the functionality of Amazon's EC2, using the Amazon command-line tools directly.
When I asked Eucalyptus Systems' Rich Wolski, who helped create the Eucalyptus Software, what companies are doing with the software, he said:
"They're doing a variety of things, but a lot of them are basically interested in Eucalyptus for doing the same kinds of things they're doing in Amazon AWS, such as business logic applications, where part of the attraction of Eucalyptus is that they can use it as a platform for seamlessly running their public cloud applications and their on-premise cloud apps."
Wolski pointed to a number of advantages that an open source cloud platfrom can have over proprietary ones. "There are basically two main advantages," he said. "Open source can give you access to a constantly changing and evolving ecosystem. That's why Linux is popular in data centers, where many interfaces can come from one basic core. Secondly, open source can be run on a wide variety of hardware and resources. Eucalytpus can run on old versions of Linux, new versions of Linux, old hypervisors, new hypervisors. Proprietary players, on the other hand, are very focused on producing one version to work everywhere."
This kind of flexibility is going to be very important to companies who are developing cloud strategies. They're not going to be willing to just throw everything out in the cloud, and give up all control of their data. Instead, they'll want public cloud tools to co-exist with private cloud tools, and an open source platform is the most flexible solution for such scenarios.
Both Amazon and Microsoft would be wise to look into open source cloud computing platforms, open cloud APIs, and the most flexible software infrastructure tools they can associate with their cloud offerings. There are already rumors that Amazon may open source its web services and cloud APIs. Microsoft, in particular, will contend with significant threats from open source offerings in the cloud competition if it pursues a purely proprietary, inflexible path. Amazon's rock-bottom Linux cloud computing pricing is already driving that point home.
Finally, let's not ignore the many other companies and organizations pursuing open source cloud efforts. Sun Microsystems has paved an open source cloud computing path with its Open Cloud Platform, and Red Hat is pursuing similar goals. Joyent, Reservoir, Enomalism and 10Gen are just a few of the other players with significant open source cloud computing efforts in place. The "roll your own cloud" open source movement is just getting started.
