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August 20, 2008

Today, there are some cloud computing vendors, such as IBM, 3-Tera and Nirvani that push their own proprietary platforms and tools, forcing users that adopt their apps to limit their options and work either in a restricted or rather closed architecture. And of course, that's not so good for them.

When some of these established IT vendors and system integrators talk about cloud computing, they actuall mean THEIR cloud. As a result, Internet application developers may believe that, in order to use cloud computing, they must accept limitations in the way they write and build their applications.

Of course that theory is a big misconception! Open standards for cloud computing are already in place and are being constantly adjusted.

However, this doesn't mean that a single cloud computing platform is universally available either. But just as some IT vendors have developed their own proprietary platforms for working in the clouds, so have various open source companies and developers in the Linux community.

Among the most popular middleware products are JBoss Enterprise Middleware, WSO2, Iona Fuse, and, last but certainly not least, the IBM WebSphere Application Server Community Edition.

"We're already there. That is the trend I'm seeing," says Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. "Most Internet-based startups aren't buying hardware or software. They are using open source middleware and programming products like Ruby on Rails and Perl."

Cloud computing is more of a process than one set technology. The concept behind what is now referred to as cloud computing has been called a variety of things, including cluster computing, utility computing, grid computing and on-demand computing.

The push toward open standards for cloud computing has been going on for some time. This trend toward using open source tools for accessing the clouds is continuing to grow, says Zemlin.

In its current trappings, the cloud computing model involves distributing computing tasks such as data storage and data center contents to a variety of Internet connections, software, and services accessed over a network.

This collection of servers enables users to access supercomputing features. The data isn't anchored to one physical location either.

For example, a team of application developers in the Computer Science Department at the University of California recently released the Eucalyptus Project, an open source infrastructure for cloud computing that mimics Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2), under the FreeBSD license.

The name Eucalyptus stands for Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems. This software infrastructure implements cloud computing on clusters. Its design supports multiple client-side interfaces. Eucalyptus uses Linux tools and basic Web service technologies.

Perhaps the most challenging factor for potential adopters of cloud computing services to consider is which path best meets their needs. According to Zemlin, many organizations are integrating open source products to offer various choices for accessing cloud computing services.

It's important to note that some cloud computing players aren't disputing the availability of open source products, but instead question how much of an industry standard already exists. They aren't sure how best to apply data management to the cloud, as an example.

Another similar instance would be the 10-Gen platform-as-a-service technology, similar to SaaS(Software as a Service). Recently released in alpha, it is designed to help developers build dynamic, scalable, mission-critical Web sites and Internet applications.

According to the 10gen Web site, its software stack is analogous to Google's App Engine in that it provides a new stack of database, grid management and application server tools to run in a cloud environment. The application server supports JavaScript as its first development language, and is an extension to Java Servlets.

And it also currently supports Ruby on Rails. 10-Gen developers plan to build in support for other languages as well.

Darcy says his company's top tier enterprise customers are pushing the envelope on cloud computing. They ask for cloudware and want extensions of existing software and standards.

Aaron Darcy, director of product line management for the JBoss Division of Red Hat says "we are all for open standards via open source. But there is no clear path yet to what that standard should be."

"Our customers want to leverage cloud computing for its economy and quick deployment to market. But they don't want to reinvent the wheel either," Darcy added.

Red Hat, like other companies, is pushing products to market as fast as it can to fill customer demands in the clouds. For example, Amazon has worked a deal with Red Hat to run some of its open source products, such as JBoss Application Server, in the clouds. That makes sense, Darcy says, because it reflects a natural extension of what his company is doing on the enterprise level.

"With cloud computing standards, no one has it right yet, including us. The market is still so young," said Darcy.

The goal of cloud computing should be access through open standards. That is the only way the technology can adjust to new developments without locking in users to an inflexible platform, Darcy believes.

Source: Web Services.

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