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Why We're Fighting for an Open Cloud (Linux.com)
Over at Linux.com, Amanda McPherson, the Linux Foundation's VP of Marketing and Developer Programs, makes the case for the open cloud. "But during any technology shift, users can either gain or lose power, and cloud computing represents both an opportunity and a threat. An opportunity to have more computing power, more cheaply and efficiently. But a threat to give up the freedom won by the open source software revolution. In fact, cloud computing platforms can deliver much more vendor lock in than the old client/server vendor-led worlds ever did." As part of the post, she also announced the schedule for the CloudOpen conference which will be held in conjunction with LinuxCon North America in San Diego, August 29-31.
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mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jun 21, 2012 21:46 UTC (Thu) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link]
The cloud is a sideshow. It's an effect of the smartphone, not the cause.
Mainframes were displaced by minicomputers, which were displaced by micro (I.E. "personal") computers, which are being replaced by smartphones. Each time the previous technology got kicked up into the server space, and this time around they're calling that "the cloud". It's just as big a deal as a vax salesman telling you how great it would be to have a department server back in the 1980's.
Making a smartphone become self hosting is a question of software, not hardware. USB docking stations could give you two full sized monitors, keyboard, mouse, network, extra disk space, and speakers (all while charging the phone) back under USB 2, let alone USB 3. Just one example:
http://us.toshiba.com/computers/accessories/dynadock
Here's people turning a Raspberry PI into a desktop system, you think an HTC Inedible would be _harder_ to do this with?
http://hackaday.com/2012/06/21/turning-a-raspberry-pi-int...
Fighting for a position on "the cloud" is like fighting for a position on the mainframe. It's yesterday's news repackaged in anthology format.
(And no, the Zune Tablet's keyboard isn't interesting. Successful tablets are big phones, not small PCs. Microsoft reinvented the Microvax. The PC replaced the VT100, but it didn't do so running VMS. Docking your phone to full PC display peripherals is something it has to be able to do in _addition_ to being a good phone, not instead of.)
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jun 21, 2012 22:27 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
This may be a digression but the "cloud" brings one new feature that wasn't realized very often in the Mainframe era and that is multi-tenancy. The difference between buying (or renting) your own VAX or System 360 or renting just a part of someone else's that you access over a network is a big deal and finally (re)achieves the main goal that the Internet project was started for in the first place.
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jun 21, 2012 22:53 UTC (Thu) by theophrastus (guest, #80847) [Link]
We did exactly that (if i properly understand what your term "multi-tenancy" means) back in the stone ages ~1990. We gave the local "high energy physics" department some money to allow us to process our NMR distance constrains data on their cluster.
well-stated landley! i wanted to say exactly the same myself. but wouldn't have made nearly as clear a case of it. the whole "cloud" phenomenon feels like utter deja-vu to those of us that came up through computer analysis in the 80s and 90s (yes yes i'm *old* hey you kids! get off my cloud... etc)
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jun 22, 2012 1:29 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
Yeah. My point was that shared computing as you describe was one of the big drivers of the early Internet when it was just research institutions, it fell by the wayside a bit when commercial entities connected and through the web 1.0 boom. It used to be that the only applications that mattered were smtp, FTP and telnet, telnet being the original "cloud computing" protocol.
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jun 22, 2012 2:43 UTC (Fri) by theophrastus (guest, #80847) [Link]
NFS too. that was one of my favorites (uh oh... TLA time) i mean Network File System. that and rlogin (which was replaced by SSH) and we never knew where our data-sets were physically located and being reduced, it was almost like our home directories were variously linked to ...a network, or even, (dare i say it?) ...a cloud. backup your directory and it didn't matter if that "cloud" was actually the chemistry computer closet (CCC) buring down -again-.
funny they went with "the cloud" from whiteboard network drawings. shoulda been something like "the grid"... no, that's Tron, isn't it? or "the matri..." oh.no... hmm. how about "the wad"?
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jun 23, 2012 5:19 UTC (Sat) by djao (guest, #4263) [Link] I think the lack of administrative overhead in the current generation of cloud services is a big difference compared to previous incarnations of NFS, telnet, ssh, and so on.With NFS, in addition to installing all the client and server software, you need to configure the server software, and on the client you need to know which server and which directory your remote filesystem resides on, and configure your client to mount this share manually. With distributed filesystems like AFS, the configuration steps are easier than NFS, but the initial installation of the software (especially on the server side) is a huge pain. The older protocols were not very robust. Of course they all required a working network connection on the part of the client. In addition, if your NFS or AFS server goes down, your client machines are left high and dry. If you compare NFS or AFS with Dropbox then you'll notice that Dropbox offers a big jump in functionality compared with the previous solutions. Now I am not a big fan of Dropbox and in fact I have some serious concerns about their approach to security and privacy, but I am speaking solely of functionality here. Dropbox involves no server administration whatsoever. They take care of all that for you. They even take care of backups (at least, I hope they do). On the client side, you need to install their program, and that's it. There is almost zero client configuration necessary -- just type in your username and password and you're done. It works everywhere: Windows, Mac, Linux, phones, tablets, you name it. If you're offline it will just sync your changes when you're back online. You can share a particular file or directory with any other user anywhere in the world, with almost no overhead: just click the folder and type in the recipient's email address. This is almost impossible to do with NFS, and scales very badly on NFS if N users at different sites are sharing files with M recipients at different sites. Certainly the cloud takes some inspiration from what came before but it's wrong to say that the cloud adds nothing new.
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jun 23, 2012 9:13 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
> If you compare NFS or AFS with Dropbox then you'll notice that Dropbox offers a big jump in functionality compared with the previous solutions.
different functionality yes, more functionality no.
with 'old' solutions, you can run your application directly from the network, you can't do that with dropbox.
there's also the issue of simultaneous access.
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jun 23, 2012 10:43 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] with 'old' solutions, you can run your application directly from the network, you can't do that with dropbox. You can, if you really wish. there's also the issue of simultaneous access. Well, this is price you need to pay if you want to work with WAN. CODA also had this problem and in the end was even worse: you kind-of had the ability to use any programs with it, but in reality if was recipe for disaster. IOW: "lost functionality" is not lost because people had no way to implement it, it just interfered with "hassle-free" principle of the cloud and this is why it was removed.
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jun 23, 2012 20:16 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
and this is why I disagree that the cloud provides more functionality.
I would agree that it provides different functionality.
but "more functional" implies that you can still do the same things as you could do with the "less functional" system. If neither system can really do what the other system does, one isn't more or less functional than the other, they just have different functions. Under some conditions you will value one function over the other, and under other conditions the value of the functions will flip.
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jun 23, 2012 11:02 UTC (Sat) by djao (guest, #4263) [Link]
Simultaneous access sucks hard on NFS or AFS. The old protocols definitely don't win here.
I don't know what you mean by running applications directly from the network. We're talking about storage protocols, no? Storage is not related to applications. Dropbox is not intended for remote hosting of applications and nobody uses it for that purpose. There are different products such as EC2 for remote execution of applications; they would be the proper basis for comparison. If you mean that NFS supports things such as root filesystem over NFS, this is a comparatively easy problem to solve. For example put your filesystem image in the cloud and point your hypervisor to it (there are other ways too). Besides, the market demand for this feature is tiny compared with the market for personal storage.
Sorry for having to guess what you mean, but you really should be clearer about what you mean. To me there's no question that cloud storage solves a lot of really hard, previously unsolved problems that normal people find useful to have solved. In the end, if the old stuff does A, and the new stuff does B, and B is much more useful than A, then that's a big improvement, and one should not trivialize this accomplishment as merely "different functionality".
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jun 23, 2012 20:19 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
B is only "much more useful than A" if you don't need to do A and do need to do B
I'm not saying that B isn't useful, but to say that it's better than A requires that it can replace A.
Dropbox and equivalent have their place, but they are not a replacement for NFS/CIFS/AFS or other network filesystems.
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jun 23, 2012 20:37 UTC (Sat) by djao (guest, #4263) [Link]
The number of people who need to do B far exceeds the number of people who need to do A. It is therefore completely fair and accurate to say that, in aggregate, population-wide, B is much more useful than A.
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jun 23, 2012 20:41 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
that depends on the value of using A vs B
if A is used in the datacenters that provide the B functionality to users, then B would not exist without A and that would make A far more useful.
there are far more cars on the roads than trucks, but to say that cars are more useful, and therefor we should eliminate trucks would very quickly result in no more cars on the road either.
that's why I say that they are different, not more or less useful
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jun 23, 2012 20:55 UTC (Sat) by djao (guest, #4263) [Link]
I'm just guessing here, but I'm quite sure that most cloud storage providers do not use NFS, CIFS etc. in any way whatsoever.
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jun 23, 2012 21:25 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
IMO, NFS/CIFS and other 'old' network technologies are too naïve to be useful in the current world. They were all designed for LANs and simply don't work with WANs.
And we actually don't have good solutions for WANs right now. But it's clear that the good old idea of 'network transparency' is dead.
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jun 23, 2012 21:35 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
I'm not saying that they do work for WANs, but they still work quite well for LANs.
you would not use something like dropbox for a LAN filesystem
and that's my point, the solution for WAN and LAN are just different, what will work well for one will not work well with the other.
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jun 23, 2012 22:27 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Well, we actually use DropBox across LANs simply because it works. And it also works across WANs.
It's clearly not optimal, sure. But it works everywhere.
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jun 23, 2012 23:48 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
but you don't use dropbox to replace NFS type network filesystems, you use dropbox to do different (probably archival type) things instead.
dropbox is not a replacement for NFS type things, it's a different beast that does different things.
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jun 24, 2012 0:04 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
We actually DO use it somewhat like NFS. Our molecular biologists write code on their laptops in a folder which is synced with a folder on our large server.
Most of time they run things locally, but if they need a lot of computing power then they can log into the cluster server and run things there. And results will be synced back to their laptops. Yes, there's a small lag in replication, but it's just a few seconds usually.
I'd argue that this is a superior solution to using NFS.
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jun 24, 2012 0:18 UTC (Sun) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
following your logic, git is a better filesystem that NFS or dropbox because it provides version control features.
but I don't think that any of the git developers would take you seriously if you started saying that git was a replacement for NFS.
you are using dropbox to archive data and to access that archive from multiple places.
that is vastly different from the network filesystem approach where the application and user treat the remote storage like it was local storage.
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jun 24, 2012 0:27 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Yes, git would be great for these kind of tasks if it could do fast automatic replication. I've tried to move our scientists to git, but they resist. Indeed, DropBox works just fine for them - they don't need to do explicit commits, pushes and pulls. You just change a file and it's changed on the server.
Oh, and they're using rsnapshot for backups. So git's ability to store history is not really a selling point.
>that is vastly different from the network filesystem approach where the application and user treat the remote storage like it was local storage
So DropBox works great for a lot of people simply because it doesn't try to do everything.
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jun 24, 2012 6:20 UTC (Sun) by spaetz (subscriber, #32870) [Link]
I've tried to get something like dropbox-via-git with a smallish python app:
https://gitorious.org/synkie
It's a console app, inspired by sparkleshare and dvcs-autosync. As it works for me, and was written by me, it might have many rough edges though.
Feedback and patches welcome.
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jul 1, 2012 2:55 UTC (Sun) by jnahmias (subscriber, #16282) [Link]
Sounds like you want git-annex: http://git-annex.branchable.com/design/assistant/
IBM never sold mainframes, it rented them Posted Jun 21, 2012 23:12 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] IBM rented mainframes from the day one - and you had the ability to rent part of it. But then, if you needed to reach it you had to rent the line (only after 1984 it become possible to use regular phone line for that and bandwidth was atrocious). Smartphones are fundamentally different: they are phones, after all. Always-connected nature is their raison d'être, not some kind of bonus! This means "cloud" is natural extension of the smartphone, not something optional. Of course Landley is correct in noting that our current paradigm (where we have huge expensive servers "in the cloud" and smartphones as mere clients) is temporary, but it just means that we should think more about "P2P cloud developments" and not concentrate on free software replacements for dropbox. E.g.: we should not try to write FOSS replacement for the Facebook - we should think if we can create distributed system which can provide similar capabilities.
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jun 21, 2012 23:30 UTC (Thu) by rillian (subscriber, #11344) [Link]
What's important about cloud computing is not whether jobs run on local or remote hardware, but that ubiquitous connectivity makes it possible to run services on that remote hardware, in aggregate, for many people and organizations. Which is great if there's choice, and the data held and manipulated by those services is under the user's control. Often this isn't so, and this is a step backward from running services on a server you bought yourself.
It's important to fight for an open cloud for the same reason it's important to fight for open software on mainframes. Networked computing isn't new, and neither are the issues it poses for software freedom. We need to continue to provide alternatives, regardless of the platforms they run on.
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jun 22, 2012 1:03 UTC (Fri) by AndreE (subscriber, #60148) [Link]
It's hardly a sideshow. If you find the freedoms provided by free software valuable, Software-as-a-Service is basically one huge step towards an even more proprietary model than we already have. People obtain their accounting software, their CRM, their word processors from these services, which at the moment deny some of the user freedoms free software explicitly tries to defend.
If we thought older iterations of MS office propagated vendor lock in, what about not being able access the software because your subscription to the Office Service has expired? The concept of "legacy" software becomes redundant, and users are forced to pay annual fees regardless if they feel an upgrade is valuable.
As for mainframes, these aren't the sort of services mainframe providers were renting out cheaply to the average consumer, are they?. You can't separate the technology from it's price to provision and it's accessibility to general users. "Cloud Computing", whatever you may think of it's technical foundations, is relatively new in terms of it's ubiquity and the way it is being targeted at the general public. If people just accept the closed, proprietary nature of these services without question, then we will see the erosion of basic free software principles.
If you want a decent example of this already happening, have a look at Dropbox. It's security is considered to be quite average, user private keys are accessible to Dropbox staff, and it has been shown that staff have used keys to look into user files. Despite this it is probably one of the most popular storage locker services, because it got in on the ground floor and users have just accepted this way of operating. People who move most likely end up at another service which offers essentially the same proprietary service, just run by someone else.
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jun 22, 2012 19:46 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] The cloud is a sideshow. It's an effect of the smartphone, not the cause.Hardly. When you can host 40 million users paying ~$1M/year (and be bought for $1B); when several supercomputers run on rented hardware; when you can move your website to the cloud in two hours; then it is a paradigm shift. Now, smartphones are another paradigm shift, because you can carry a computer on your pocket. I must confess that for me it is much less surprising than cloud computing: I never thought that "grid computing" (the previous name, or providing computer services as a utility) would mesh with virtualized hardware and would end up making a great service. The only reason why fighting for a piece of the action in the cloud business is a bad idea is because Amazon provides an outstanding service and they must have around one million machines right now. Hard to catch up.
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jun 22, 2012 21:56 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
>The cloud is a sideshow. It's an effect of the smartphone, not the cause.
Nope. They are unrelated phenomena.
'Cloud' is the result of cheap and fast Internet connections. Our small startup biotech can easily rent hundreds of nodes on Amazon EC2, paying only for the required time. We can process data from our clients as fast as we need, without paying millions for our cluster which will be mostly idle.
This is new. There was nothing comparable earlier in the history of computing. Yes, there was sharing of CPU resources earlier, but it always required a lot of work to setup and had large administrative overhead. Now you only need to have a credit card and Internet connection and you can start your own cluster in minutes without any interactions with other humans.
Hell, Amazon even has a spot market for CPU time! We're actually using software initially designed to predict asset prices to minimize our cost. We actually have something close to a global CPU market - the Sci-Fi future is here.
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