On Mon, 2010-07-19 at 22:27 -0700, Antonio Olivares wrote: > Dear fellow Fedora users, > > In light of the other(s) Big Distro makers, Red Hat is also taking a look at not staying behind. Here's an article that might be of interest: > > http://press.redhat.com/2010/07/12/red-hat-introduces-cloud-consulting-services-as-part-of-cloud-foundations-edition-one/ > > Hope that is is not offensive and is not taken against anyone in particular. The cloud computing is a topic that I believe should have more input and while I am opposed to it, I like for others to take a look at this lively topic. > > See more and other topics of interest at Distrowatch Weekly > > http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20100719 My personal view is that I see cloud computing on several levels. On the top level, there is the ability to easily move your data and/or computing/networking needs around in the cloud. If your users are allowed to host services in the external cloud you should strive to also offer an internal one. The cloud starts in your own server room. One example is an app we run that gets feeds from multiple webcams around town, processes them, and streams them to web browsers. The web portal runs on our own servers. The streaming of all those camera feeds would put a load on our internet connection, so we moved that application to the amazon cloud. The service running on that VM is public. Anyone can see the data live anyway, so there is no security implication. We get that load moved away from our own networks and firewalls. On a lower level, I see cloud services as API's and ABI's that enable us to manage resources in vendor-independent manners. For storage, this may finally give us what Sun tried to do many years ago with java-based management services for storage. One interface? One that is focused on provisioning, and not on technical details of the back-end? Still sounds too good to be true. But if it works and it means we (the back-end admins) can continue to override the users wishes and provide what they need instead of what they ask for, I'm all for it (like when DBA's come with very specific orders detailing raid type and stripe width for their data and log volumes and we give them everything from our standardized raid 5 pools) There are tools today that enable me to move data around between different storage systems without the user noticing. This enables migration of old data to cheaper storage and so on. The problem is that I then have to handle several storage systems potentially from different vendors and with completely different interfaces. On top of that we get yet another service that remaps the logical view of the storage. There is a limit to how many different systems I can grok. The software also gets expensive. If the cloud services will help me do this with one interface at a reasonable price I will be very happy. If the cloud interface has to sit on top of all this it will just add expenses. For VM's this is great. More openness would mean that it would become more feasible to run multiple physical farms. One VMware farm (production servers, HA and/or FT support, etc), one farm based on free software for development and testing, perhaps one hyper-v if you have a volume agreement with m$ that makes this cheaper for your windows vm's... If I can have one console to manage them all, move vm's around and so on I would be very happy. For networking it seems a bit cloudy yet how this will work out. There are so many security implications. If I open up the possibility for my internal customers to host computing services in the external cloud, I would like to make sure everything they order has to be verified against company security policies. Those security policies will also need a rewrite to accommodate these new services. Conclusion? Cloud services are very interesting. The potential implications on interoperability within my own server room? That's the big one. Will it just add to the complexity, or is this so hyped up now that everybody will support new standards at a low level so we can actually simplify internal operations? Will it ever become what the hype promises? Nobody believes that, I think... -- birger -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
