What Is Open Cloud?

by John Mark Walker - Apr. 14, 2010Comments (4)

I've read a bit of angst about cloud lock-in, a lot of weed pulling in the form of interoperability standards for the cloud, and a manifesto or two about 'Open Cloud'. And in between, I've seen lots of interesting new tools for cloud computing, and lots of narratives about how the tools, combined with the formalization of use cases, pave the way for open clouds.

But what, exactly, does "Open Cloud" mean? And what role does open source play? Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, likes to say that open source and the cloud go together like peanut butter and chocolate. But does open source necessarily mean open cloud, and vice-versa?

I'm not at all convinced that simply using open source software means that cloud-based services will be open, too. Nor do I think that *not* using open source software necessarily means a 'closed' cloud. Of course, what Jim means is that without open source, cloud computing would not be possible. This is true; I'm just not sure how relevant it is. After all, automobiles are impossible to use without roads, but nobody seriously questions whether we'll continue to pave over dirt.

Jim also believes that cloud vendors will be incentivized, just like their earthbound ISV brethren, to participate in open source communities.One can see this already happening. Facebook, Yahoo! and Google all participate in massive open source projects, often to great fanfare. These are without a doubt good things, and yet there are plenty of developers and users alike who question the motives of larger players and whether they will 'play nice' to avoid screwing over users after they get more industry leverage. Clearly, something is missing if we're to create the same sustainable model as we did with open source / free software.

When I think of "Open Cloud" I think of open source's friendly cousin - someone who acts similarly but has grown up in a different household and with slightly different values. 'Open Cloud' doesn't refuse open source code, but it doesn't require it, either. Rather, think of 'Open Cloud' as a definition of explicit rights or freedoms, much like those in the Open Source Definition

I think we've reached the point where some of these rights are beginning to take shape:

The freedom to access data in both raw and packaged formats at any time
The freedom to build any application or service on top of data, regardless of technology, platform or commercial provider
The freedom to mimic services and "hotswap" data stores to competing services

What I'm trying to get at, above, is that any discussion about 'open cloud' is really a discussion about data. And not just the kilobytes of storage, but the data vectors - the context, velocity and ultimate destination of the data. And what about ownership? Who owns the data? Do we have the right to dictate how the data is owned? Should we have the right to dictate the vectors of that data? In a world where data is currency, all of these things matter.

See, Tim O'Reilly tried to warn us. He tried to tell us that the rules of open source that we were accustomed to were increasingly irrelevant in a post-web world. And by golly, he was right.

So tomorrow, April 14, i have the privilege of moderating a panel consisting of Sam Ramji (Codeplex Foundation), Doug Tidwell (IBM), David Lutterkort (Red Hat) and James Urquhart (Cisco) as we discuss "Does Open Source Mean Open Cloud?". I have no doubt that we will resolve nothing, but hopefully we'll steer the conversation in the right direction.

The Linux Foundation does a great job of putting on the Collaboration Summit, so you should participate even if you're not interested in this conversation.

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by Khürt L Williams on Apr. 14, 2010

I think you are quite right in concluding that Open Cloud is about data - open data formats. I think all of computing has really been about that and less about what technology is used to access/manipulate/manage that data. Looking forward to hearing about the talk.

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by Jerson Insurencia on Apr. 15, 2010

thanks for informing us about open cloud

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by an anonymous user on Apr. 18, 2010

I agree that this is a very important movement for those of us who wish to remain vendor neutral with our production environments, similar to how many larger company's utilize multiple ISP's at their collocation facilities. However, I imagine the cloud providers are not anxious to adopt this given that it moves them more towards the commodity space.

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by Sigurd Magnusson on May. 08, 2010

The inclusion of the word 'Open' in Open Cloud could mislead people into thinking that an "Open Cloud" is a virtualised hosting environment that contains the freedoms associated with open source software. As this isn't the case, I have some difficulty with the term and wonder whether a more accurate adjective could be sought. I also think that 'open cloud' should mean something more ambitious, and more important, to innovation in the software industry.

I digress, but perhaps Richard Stallman is smiling here, noting that if the term 'open source' hadn't risen to popularity, and we had stayed with free software as a term, we might not have arrived at this problem. That said, perhaps even that is optimistic thinking, given I'm sure a marketer somewhere would try to popularise 'free cloud' as a term.

I think what you are describing above has more to do with data and application portability, which comes through the setting and adoption of standards. With the rise of SaaS applications, this is important, because, for example, if I decide to move from a 37 Signals product to one of its competitors, I want to move my data across. Likewise if that competitor to the 37 Signals product has used a cloud platform to host their SaaS app, and wants to hypothetically shift from Amazon EC2 to Azure or RackSpace cloud, then the industry needs a sufficiently standarised operating system that makes this migration a similar effort as moving a stand-alone website from Rackspace to GoDaddy.

Coming to my main issue with the term 'open cloud', it is useful to consider how someone can have the freedom to access the source code providing the underlying cloud-based operating system, and, importantly, be in a position to re-use, edit, or re-host that. From an open-ness perspective, cloud computing platforms currently are similar to running an open source software application on top of a stand-alone Windows box: if you find a bug with the operating system or web server you don't experience the freedoms you get when you've hosted it on Apache and Linux. I think this is important because it seems to me that over the past decade we've really addressed reliability and performance of websites to a significant extent. Cloud computing could generate a lot of work for people to keep uptime at the level we are currently achieving with moderate ease now. If there's a bug in the cloud OS that you can't touch, and it's hurting your business while you wait for it get fixed, that's a serious issue, and it doesn't matter whether your cloud has all of the 'open cloud' attributes you've described.

A side issue to all of this is that if we include Facebook as a cloud platform, which it surely is, then when you consider how different that is as an application "fabric" compared to EC2, Google AppEngine, or Azure. It would be very hard to come up with a set of standards that gives you portability over these. That said, I'm in favour of the attributes of data access and application portability that you describe; I just see these as a stepping stone towards an even more 'open' form of cloud computing than what we're being pitched at the moment.

I'm curious - how long will it be before players like RedHat, Google, Microsoft, or Amazon begin to release cloud platforms as free software projects? While we wait, the software industry is set for a lot of discussions around lock-in, portability, standards, reliability, and costs.

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