Cloudy weather ahead...

You probably heard - Google announced its "cloud" Google App Engine - tonight. Although they have stated that it will allow "automatic scaling and load balancing" it is most assuredly not a "grid". Now with Amazon's EC2 offering and Google App Engine, a key distinction between traditional grids and clouds can be seen.

Why are clouds different? Many of the grid computing offerings (not all I might add) seem to have a scientific air about them that is both offputting and overly elaborate. Academic solutions tend to slow themselves as the inventors work to perfect everything - focusing on the corner cases. Market solutions tend to give you a couple different configurations; each one pushing a nasty corner cases to the edge of the room and ignoring it. As long as your needs aren't in that corner - then this works for you.

Clouds are gathering in this way. Attempting to use Amazon EC2 "for real" highlights hundreds of things it can't do well, or yet. So what? There are hundreds of things it can do - if you want to get one of them done, use it. Or don't. Clouds don't care. That's another difference.

Clouds don't care.

Amazon - It's cloud is based on virtualization with Xen base containers. Anonymous servers, anonymous services, simple web API, nominal SLAs. But it is simply awesome if your use-case fits. By the way, CHEAP!

Google App Engine - Python version 2.5.2, "the datastore", Google Accounts APIs, URL fetch, email services, Django support, and a simple web framework "webapp". And did I mention CHEAP! Free for use by the first 10,000 developers to sign up. As best I could tell the 10,000 accounts were gone in about 20 seconds.

Look at the descriptions of these two real world services. They are not the stuff traditional data center solutions are made of. I can just see various IT types listing their objections to Google's new offering:

• Python mathematical routines are nowhere nearly as "performant" as Perl
  
• Django is nowhere as easy as Rails
  
• "the datastore" doesn't implement ANSI SQL - in fact what the hell is this GQL?
  
• Email API only let's me send messages - I MUST be able to read them
  
• Webapp is not sophisticated enough for me
  
• I need to compile a C library for use on the piece of hardware where it will run
  
• I am concerned about SLA's. I need guarantees! I won't agree to the Terms of Service!
  

You know what?

Clouds don't care. Your complexity is not their problem!

Each of these two clouds provide a lot if you are willing to be cheap, flexible, and creative. While complex types sit back and complain - those who take advantage are going to prevail. Look at evolution; big, fat energy inefficient organisms usually don't evolve to become nimble, energy efficient creatures. They go extinct and make way for the next wave of situationally optimal lifeforms. What do I mean by this sentence? One interpretation would be "don't expect ATT's Sterling Commerce to threaten either EC2 or AppEngine for cost, performance or speed."

Looking through Admiral Boom's telescope
More clouds are rumored, not released, but may be announced by end of '08. Maybe virtualized containers of any format? Maybe application containers of a new and interesting type? Here are some of the things coming:

Mashup engines - Here you go Yahoo, this one is free. Mashups are fine - but they tend to be information integrated at the moment of user consumption. What about all the gluecode that runs in the middle to make really cool mashups? The code that does temporality, flow, trend, events, averages, highs, lows, estimates - on all sorts of services - that I want to display visually after long running background aggregation. Long-running data mashups with quick visual displays.

BEA Project Genesis - announced at BEAworld Shanghai. BEA application services in a cloud. Standards-based (at the core) - subscription-based. Easy for developers to access. Drop in an EAR and start billing.

P2P Clouds - VcubeV lets you do Virtual Private Data Centers - the initial basis of a p2p cloud. Encrypted transmission, virtualized containers. Extensions to OpenVPN and VcubeV could let you run a slow but powerful P2P cloud. Run it like a co-op? Give cycles - get cycles?

Dinosaur "clouds" - What is the impact on business networks run by the likes of BT, ATT-Sterling Commerce and others. Multiple orders of magnitude more expensive, little customer choice, archaic APIs and monitoring services. Yikes.

At CohesiveFT we started our company precisely because we felt that open source, open standards, virtualization, and loosely-coupled architectures were going to utterly transform the way data centers worked. At this point I would say we were quite close in our anticipation, but that it is all happening even faster than we thought. Our Elastic Server service was designed to allow assembly of application components for deployment to containers and clouds. We look forward to supporting App Engine! See this space as they say.