The future of Clouds – Not a big player’s game!
Coming from a research institute focused on creating distributed system the cloud computing topic attracts me a lot. However, so far I found myself more in the role of a cloud doubter.
Not because I don’t see that the presence of an additional abstraction layer covering boundaries of individual servers to create a vast “cloud” of computing resources is the future trend. No, it’s because I think that current cloud providers create new islands, new sharply delimited, zoned computing spaces. Their prices stemm from US markets and can’t compete with EU dedicated server prices.
Cloud providers did to cloud computing what Starbucks did to coffee.
From a $1 free refill to a $5 no refill pricing model. Well, that’s an achievement :-)
Although many people blindly believe the cloud marketing bullshit out there, I also feel a lot of resistance. Absolutely qualified resistance btw. Have a look at this (german) article for details about legal issues for Germany companies in US clouds, for example. Less dramatic but more profane very often – depending on individual requirements in the last end – bare metal deployments are just cheaper than cloud deployments.
However, current cloud providers ignore millions of servers running out there wasting unbelievable amounts of energy every second. Therefore, I do not like those Cloud providing gigants out there breaking with the big cloud vision. The vision that we don’t talk about individual servers any more. Where there’re just resources and resource pools. No metal, no wires, just pure and logic computational power. Across datacenter boundaries. Across company boundaries, if demanded.
But things are changing. There’re more and more cloud stacks available. Whether it’s Eucalyptus, OpenStack or even VmWare’s vCloud, just to name a few of them. They all allow the utilization of existing hardware resources in a cloudy, flexible way. And that’s the way to go!
So I think more and more smaller clouds will come up in the next years. Additional abstraction layers will then help to mesh up these smaller clouds towards a web of computing resources.
From my opinion this trend will not be affected significantly from approaches such as Opa. A new language trying to solve the distribution, hosting and deployment problem of existing infrastructures on the programming language level. A very effective approach. I just think millions of programmers are much to lazy to jump to a new technology being so different to what has been there for decades. I mean, that’s what we’ve seen with Rails as well. There’re still too many PHP and Java people out there :-) Regarding to web development, Rails has certainly demonstrated a complete new way to go. But still people resist to change.
So let’s lay back and see what the future brings. I personally make a bet on emerging tiny clouds growing together in the long term. We’ll see.