
Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2014. Read them in this VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed article by Mark Baker, server and cloud product manager, Ubuntu
The Cloud Gets Interchangeable Parts
Last
year, all corners of the tech industry proclaimed that 2013 would be the year
cloud computing truly took hold in the enterprise. Those predictions have proven
more or less correct, and despite adoption challenges in highly regulated
industries, cloud based technologies are now a mainstay for enterprises as well
as personal computing. Just look at recent
projections
from Gartner that cloud computing will comprise more than half of IT spending by
2016. With momentum like this mounting, those who are still in "cloud denial"
are beginning to look like the naysayers from the early days of email who
doubted that the fax machine would ever go out of style.
With
cloud computing here to stay and growing rapidly, the question now is what
course that growth will take, and how the cloud will remain flexible and
malleable to the needs of an organization seeking competitive advantage in the
face of IT service commoditization. To some it may appear that there is a
trade-off to be made: some cloud platforms are tightly defined, rigidly
integrated and prescriptive about the components that can be deployed in
conjunction with them. The benefit to these platforms is that there are fewer
concerns about the compatibility of the pieces - it is assumed that the vendor
has this worked out. Another approach is for the end user to design and build a
platform themselves using technologies or vendors that meet their needs. The
upside to this is a wider choice of components, but the trade-off is that it
could take more work to select, architect, build, manage and support such a
system.
But
there is a third way and that is, in short, by improving cloud interoperability.
In other words, we need to improve how the various cloud technologies and
environments from different vendors work together, so that cloud is easy to
deploy, use and manage for organizations of all sizes. And, to achieve that, the
cloud needs interchangeable
parts.
Interchangeable
parts are the identical, standardized components used to build and repair
machines, and without them, world history taught us, the industrial revolution
would have never been possible. Prior to interchangeable parts, every gun,
clock, or other complex machine had to be custom made, because there were no
standardized components to build them with. Similarly, specialists would need to
"wing it" when something broke, and spent long hours piecing a machine back
together again. Interchangeable parts changed everything, because they
standardized the production process and enabled machines to be built cheaply and
quickly on assembly lines - which translated into cheaper and more widely
available goods for consumers.
So,
what does all this have to do with cloud computing? Well, the cloud today is in
a similar spot to where industry was before interchangeable parts. That's
because whilst there are several cloud computing standards, vendors offers their
own platforms, environments and applications, which sometimes don't work well
with each other. For instance, there are highly innovative storage, compute and
networking technologies being released practically every week, yet the cloud
computing buyer has no assurance that they can use any one of them with the
other. The result is that it's much harder, and often more expensive to build
and manage cloud infrastructure than it should be.
Rather
than expect the cloud buyer to pay large sums for infrastructure consultants to
guide them every step of the way, the industry needs to come together and find
ways to ensure interoperability exists among all cloud
components.
Fortunately, there is already significant headway within the industry to achieve
this. In fact, a number of vendors participating in OpenStack's cloud community
have recently partnered to form an interoperability
lab as
an initiative to test and validate the interoperability of different
infrastructure components. This project is helping the rapidly evolving
OpenStack project to become compatible with as many cloud components on the
market as possible.
OpenStack
and other multi-vendor cloud collaborations are taking a big step toward making
interchangeable cloud parts a reality, by assigning standards and certifications
to a wide array of cloud technologies, ensuring that they work well with each
other. We may not see fully-fledged interchangeable parts in 2014, but the
industry is definitely headed in that direction. And, it's a good thing too -
interoperability makes cloud products and services more affordable, and more
efficient, because they require less customization and management hassle, and
less changes to existing infrastructure.
As
we look to the next year and beyond, we will truly begin to see a cloud
computing industrial revolution, and the first step is to achieve
interchangeable parts.
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About the Author
Mark Baker is currently working
at Canonical in Product Strategy for Ubuntu Server and Cloud. He has more than
20 years of experience managing business development and marketing at leading
software companies including MySQL, Red Hat and Oracle.