Chip's Blog

As I posted earlier, I had an opportunity to participate in the Linux.com Open Cloud Chat.  Libby Clark posted a great summary over on Linux.com, highlighting some of the key points that Greg (from Euca), Alan (from OpenStack) and I (obviously representing CloudStack) made during the hour long discussion.  It was actually refreshing to have representatives from the three projects largely agreeing with each other on the topics.  I'm glad I had a chance to do that.

You can watch the video here:

I'm excited to have an opportunity to participate in the Linux.com sponsored Google Hangout titled "Open Cloud Infrastructure and Service Portability" this Tuesday at 10 AM PT (1 PM ET). According to the folks at Linux.com, the chat will also include leaders from Eucalyptus, Gluster, OpenShift, OpenStack, Puppet Labs, Rackspace and Red Hat. CloudStack's own Joe Brockmeier will be moderating the event.

The agenda that's being published includes topics around workload portability, tools and methods for security, hypervisor support, AWS API compatibility and, of course, any live questions from the audience. Cloud "portability" has been an important topic for me over the years, from both the perspective of cloud platform software APIs, as well as dealing with the fundamental problems that come up when working with customer migrations into an environment.

As the market has evolved, we've learned more and more about the importance of portability, and some of the forces causing users to stick with one provider. Portability is more than just API compatibility: it's APIs, data formats, injestion and extraction techniques, differences in runtime environments, contextual relationships between consumable entities, service composition models, etc... Just think about the simple question of how to handle a move from a provider that uses one hypervisor to a different provider using a different hypervisor. Or consider what application deployment options a PaaS environment has vs other PaaS environment. Certainly, many (if not all) of these individual compatibility issues have been solved with point solutions... but the complexity is still there, and the aggregate challenge is getting more difficult as organizations increase their use of cloud services over time.

It should certainly be an interesting conversation!  Be sure to join us.