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Leverage

In the meantime, CTOs and CIOs at potential cloud customers should ask vendors hard questions before they sign on with them -- while they still have leverage in the relationship. "Ask them why is it slow, why is it so expensive, why can't I use that vendor's services as well?" said Hughes-Croucher.

"If you are a startup and want to have operations in the cloud, use two clouds," suggested Bueno. "Run your major operations in cloud A, and your backups and staging in cloud B."

Many big companies are opting to go the hybrid route, noted Hughes-Croucher, but combining data from, say, four cloud vendors is slow and pricey. The cloud providers "are the ones sitting on the fast Internet connection," he said. "Why don't you make them combine that stuff, instead of you having to do it for them? You're the customer, make them do the work."

Though Yahoo doesn't sell cloud computing services, its internal cloud platform powers Web services like the Yahoo homepage and Yahoo Mail. In a Nov. 4 speech at the Cloud Conference and Expo in Santa Clara, Shelton Shugar, Yahoo's SVP of cloud computing, laid out the company's strategy. Yahoo, he said -- according to the company's Developer Network Blog -- stores hundreds of petabytes of data around the world and is building a private cloud focused on data processing and serving.

Yahoo is taking an open-source approach to the cloud. In June, the company provided the code for its internal implementation of Hadoop, a data processing framework it's been running for years, to the Apache open-source community. It also offers the Yahoo query language, a SQL-like language that allows developers to query, filter and join data from APIs around the Web -- not just from Yahoo services. "We can go out with our fast Internet connections and go and get the data and deliver it to you rather than you doing it yourselves," explained Hughes-Croucher.

But ultimately, Yahoo is solving problems for its own internal cloud. "We have software that we're open-sourcing that might help other people, but it's not our problem per se," he said. "The people who can solve it are the cloud vendors."

Comments (4)

	1. 11-29-2009 23:12
	Kudos to these gentlemen for raising awareness of a subtle and convenient to ignore problem that is well known among students of cloud computing. Adoption of cloud computing that is sourced from multiple vendors is not mature enough yet for this issue to become glaringly obvious, so now is a perfect time to get out ahead of it. I doubt vendors are incented to do so just yet. Registered

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	2. 11-30-2009 12:31
	Just wondering if perhaps Fred it may be too soon to "get out ahead of it" and the idea of it being a perfect time might be too soon. Open sourced multiple vendors for Cloud computing sounds like a good solution, but are there vendors to stand behind the effort itself? If so, who? Registered

John Sane

	3. 11-30-2009 13:27
	It's a non-trivial task, but it's best to explore this issue in greater depth now so that cloud customers appreciate the lock-in issue as opposed to discovering it too late, or before customer adoption of certain platforms is such that a de facto standard has arisen. A consortium of cloud vendors (Amazon, Salesforce, Google) would be required to really do this correctly, but as the article states their attention is likely focused on growing their already successful cloud business rather than interoperability and portability. Cloud management platforms like RightScale are a step in the right direction as they are becoming the "middleware of the cloud", but they don't have the clout yet to drive the standards although they undoubtedly feel the pain of integrating with the different platforms. Registered

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	4. 12-02-2009 17:52
	This is a critical issue for users, and thanks to the writers for raising it in a thoughtful way.     3tera has taken interoperability very seriously since services went live almost four years ago. Several steps we\'ve taken to try to minimize lock-in for users include a) working with multiple providers, b) ensuring interoperability between our providers, and c) requiring no new code in order to use the system. As a result, our users can (and frequently do) use multiple providers for DR, and even change providers at will without the need to write code or even reconfigure apps.    While we\'re interested in the standards work being done, much of it is too low level. It focuses on APIs, rather than on addressing the larger issues of application level portability.    Bert Armijo  3era Registered

Bert Armijo

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