Cloud Computing Needs To Embrace the Linux Model, Says Rackspace CTO 42
Nerval's Lobster writes "Companies are rushing to lock customer data into their specific walled gardens, Rackspace CTO John Engates argued in an interview after a Cloud Expo keynote in Silicon Valley. That makes it more important than ever to ensure that the cloud undergirding all the various functions of daily life remains open. 'These companies have grown up in the era of enterprise software and they're addicted to enterprise software margins, magnitudes more profitable than what we make as a hosting company,' he said. 'Now you have software companies embracing cloud computing and taking the same enterprise-software playbook they've had for years and trying to run it in the cloud.' Ultimately, he added, cloud computing needs to adopt the Linux model. 'Linux opened it up and gave you vendor choice, with numerous vendors bringing their own strengths to the table.'"
*cough* (Score:1)
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If it's the GNU model, then they have to issue long, sleep-inducing manifestos about how the Cloud Wants to Be Free. I don't think Rackspace and Amazon are up for that.
They also need a lame recursive acronym....
Re:*cough* (Score:4, Funny)
I could come up with a better one given time.
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You misspelled "debacle".
Keep trying!
Re:Linux model? (Score:4, Informative)
I guess some people have a problem with their computing history. Oh well, I don't expect much anymore.
He's refering to Bob J. Linux, not that operating system developed by the Torvalds bloke. It means security through obscurity, obfuscation, cruft, API's not being closely adhered to, code bloat, empire building, gaping security holes, finger pointing, denial of overwhelming evidence, fat bonuses for executives based upon their ability to get it without actually adding anything to the product or company, outsourcing to Elbonia and ultimately winning marketshare with bikini models in your advertising.
Works everytime.
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Thanks for the insightful and humorous post!
Did I miss his point? (Score:5, Funny)
'These companies have grown up in the era of enterprise software and they're addicted to enterprise software margins, magnitudes more profitable than what we make as a hosting company,'
which translates into: I have picked the wrong business model, and someone should fix it for me.
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... I have picked the wrong business model, and someone should fix it for me.
You have it right. The cloud companies are charging an unrealistic premium for their services without offering genuine security. Should regular hosting companies worry yet? I don't think so, not until someone offers a cloud computing system that does not, by default, leave its encryption keys lying around on the host server.
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Re:Did I miss his point? (Score:5, Interesting)
Because it's a waste of time.
Rackspace is trying to keep everyone focused on the hype of the cloud, to keep racking in your dough.
One "Cloud Server" with 16Gig of Ram and 4 Procs with rackspace would cost me $700+ .
I can get a third of a cabinet from CoreNap for less than $400 Month. I can fill that space with vastly more powerful hardware for about 5k. ( Shopping Smart )
Now lets do the math assuming a hardware life cycle of 5 years.
400 x 12 == 4,800 ( one year )
4,800 * 5 == 24,000 ( Five years )
hardware: $5,000
52 weeks in a year times 5 years == 260 weeks.
Spread the cost of the hardware over 5 years. ( Cash outright or lease ) .01923 per week for the hardware.
$5,000 / 260 weeks. ==
Not worth adding to the 24,000 you will spend over the next 5 years, compared to the 42,000 you will spend for a single inferior server instance at Rackspace.
And you're not eliminating engineers by going to the cloud. You still need admins.
- Dan.
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I agree on both your points.
It's a good place to fire up something to experiment with, and a good place for new companies just starting out.
But there are large enterprises that have completely missed the memo regarding static collocation vs the cloud.
- Dan.
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Provide a use case please.
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This needs modding up. After ten years of dealing with occasional hardware issues on colocated servers, I am more than happy to pay a small premium to let someone else worry about the metal, and to avoid those outages for my clients.
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In this case doubling the price is not a small premium.
While it's every Engineer's dream to not have to mess with hardware, clouds don't make sense from a business perspective.
- Dan.
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Are your clients willing to wait, with their sites offline, while you truck down to the datacenter to troubleshoot a server? Or did you expend resources to deploy a failover solution? How fast can you bring up 5 new boxes, imaged from another? Are your OS sessions virtualized, for when customer X wants to give their own admins root, or do you have to have separate hardware for those customers? There's so many extra costs, soft costs, and risks that don't seem to have been considered. If running your ow
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If Engineered correctly;
- There will be no single point of failure.
- A failure registers as an amber light on a server
- Tech gets the notice.
- Dell is called and they fix it.
[quote]If running your own hardware was bottom-line effective, there wouldn't be so much migration towards cloud solutions.[/quote]
I can't account for the power of good marketing, FUD and hype. I think it's largely due to people not thinking things through, and engineers that want a magick box, or an easy button.
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I smell astroturf...
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Rackspace and other hosting companies are used to operating on much thinner margins and will thus have an advantage over the rest of the industry
If that were true he wouldn't need to make this statement, right? Also if running on "thinner margins" was so great why are all the major PC OEMs having issues with their profitability versus Apple? Why are many of the "thinner margins" Android phone makers like HTC having major profitability issues vs Apple and Samsung? Oh right, that's because running on thinner margins is not an advantage.
"Linux Model" (Score:3)
I'd love to see some of these cloud storage services start opening up their protocols instead of relying on security through obscurity. I have a dropbox account, and I'd rather like to be able to use it on Linux without a silly proprietary daemon (and also on non-x86 platforms.)
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no he's saying he's tired of the binary blob and would gladly help write portable code that works on more than just x86 linux
their excuses for why kqueue on bsd isn't suitable are pretty poor but they wont give us the info we need to write our own client
Re:"Linux Model" (Score:4, Informative)
The Dropbox share is part of the file system. They don't mount a virtual fs or anything, they just create a directory and sync the files in and to it when anything changes.
Walled Garden...? (Score:3)
of course he does.. (Score:2)
why wouldn't he
It already exists in IaaS. No one wants PaaS. (Score:2)
In cloud-speak, we call it "IaaS" ("infrastructure as as service"), but if you need some Linux servers, some Windows servers, some database servers, whatever, there's plenty of competition between commodity providers, including RackSpace, already.
There are a few dozen large competitors (also including RackSpace) also trying to get people locked in with "PaaS" ("platform as a service"), but by and large companies are either too smart or too poor (no resources for initial development or migration) to jump int
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quote and translation (Score:3, Informative)
Ultimately, he added, cloud computing needs to adopt the Linux model.
Translation: "Please, please, please don't use EC2. Oh yeah, and Amazon beats its wife."
Is this a sponsored advertisement? (Score:2)
It must be because openess doesn't mean shit in the cloud world. It hosts apps that get dialed up and down. What's behind it is unimportant.
Openstack is developed to smell like AWS (Score:2)
The "everyone should run our open (tm) software" plea. I'm not falling for it. No customer is demanding "cloud portability" because customers don't want to change ISP, ever. I just don't think portability of whole VM networks will ever be feasible on a technical level. Even if you could shuffle IPv4 addresses and masses of data around the whole internet between providers without down time, there's no incentive for ISPs to cooperate, or willingly turn themselves into a cheaper sub-brand of Rackspace. It woul
Don't all major vendors support most platforms? (Score:2)
Hmm. All of the major cloud vendors support pretty much every platform. I happen to have an MSDN Ultimate subscription through work and we're investigating Azure as a result (1,500 hours per month of computer time for free for each Ultimate account).
I will admit that I code in C# so the platform integrates well. It only took me two days to learn the platform basics and setup a computational system with queues and a dedicated cache (one WebRole, one CacheRole, multiple WorkerRoles to process work units).
I