The Killer Proprietary Cloud.

So I might be coming around to the whole cloud computing idea despite my history of being sceptical of the whole idea. Whilst I’ve yet to go any further than researching the possibilities the potential of the cloud to eliminate a lot of the problems encountered when scaling would mean a lot less time spent on those issues and more on developing a better product. However whilst the benefits of the cloud are potentially quite large there’s also the glaring issue of vendor dependency and lock in as no two cloud providers are the same nor is there any real standards around the whole cloud computing idea. This presents a very large problem for both cloud native services and those looking to migrate to the cloud platform as once you’ve made your choice you’re pretty much locked in unless you’re willing to pay for significant rework.

Right now my platform of choice is looking to be Windows Azure. Primarily this is because of the platform familiarity as whilst the cloud might be a whole new computing paradigm services built on the traditional Microsoft platform won’t have a hard time being migrated across. Additionally they’ve got a fantastic offer for MSDN subscribers, giving them a small instance and whole swath of other goodies to get them off the ground. This is good news for aspiring entrepreneurs like myself as Microsoft offers a free MSDN Premium subscription to start-ups (called BizSpark) who’ve been together for less than 3 years and less than $1 million in revenue. However as I was comparing this to the other cloud providers out there I noticed that no two were alike, in fact they were all at odds with each other.

Take the biggest cloud provider out there, Amazon’s EC2. Whilst the compute instances are pretty comparable since they’re just the operating system the other services (file storage, databases) are worlds away from each other and it’s not just the API calls that are different either. Amazon’s cloud offering is architecturally different from that of Microsofts, so much so that any code written for Azure will have to be wholly rewritten in order to function on their cloud. This means that when it comes time to move your service into the cloud you’ll have to make sure you trust the provider that you’re going to be going with. You could also double the entire budget and keep half of it in reserve should it ever come to that, but I doubt many people have that luxury.

Like the format wars that have raged for the past century such incompatibility between cloud providers only serves to harm the consumers of such services. Whilst I’m not suggesting the notion that there be one and only one cloud provider (corporations really can’t be trusted with monopolies and I’d hate to think what a government sanctioned cloud would look like) what’s missing from the current cloud environment is a level of interoperability that we’re so used to seeing in this Internet enabled age. The good news is that I’m not the only one to notice issues like this and there are several movements working towards an open set of standards for cloud operators to adopt. This not only provides the level of interoperability that’s currently lacking in the cloud world but would also give customers more confidence when working with smaller cloud operators, knowing that they wouldn’t be left high and dry should they fail.

Like any technology in its infancy cloud computing still has a ways to go before it can before it can be counted amongst its more mature predecessors. Still the idea has proven itself to be viable, usable and above all capable of delivering on some of the wild promises it made back when it was still called SaaS. With the d-day fast approaching for Lobaco I’ll soon be wandering into the cloud myself and I’m sure I’ll have much more to write about it when the time comes. For now though I’m happy to say that my previous outlook on the cloud was wrong, despite the problems I’ve cited here today.