transcyberia.info - cloudcomputing

autonomo.us cloud computing

nospam@example.com (Guido Stevens) — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 11:50:00 +0200

A flurry of activity on free software blogs addresses the losses of freedom brought about by cloud computing.

The Free Software Foundation is concerned, that:

the movement of software off of personal computers has reconfigured power relationships between users and their software and complicated questions of ownership and control in ways that free software advocates do not yet know how to address.

Cloud computing presents a centralization of resources, hence a centralization of power. The software you're using doesn't run on your own PC, it runs on a distant server. The documents you're creating aren't saved on your local harddisk, but somewhere on the intarweb. The combination of the two presents a major shift of control away from you, an individual, towards a few giant global technology corporations.

That's scary. Read on for countermeasures.

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Xen and EC2: make or buy?

nospam@example.com (Guido Stevens) — Fri, 16 May 2008 14:08:00 +0200

Virtualization is cool. Literally. Consolidating servers is a great way to reduce carbon emissions.

Running a multi-core Xen server nowadays is like having a mini-datacenter-in-a-box. Cramming a dozen logical servers into the rackspace and energy footprint of a single physical server, it's a geek paradise. And a boon for the bottom line.

So naturally, when Amazon keeps upping the ante in it's Xen-based EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing) offering, that's a cool thing.

Which begs the question: make or buy? How does running your own server rack (make) compare to renting EC2 capacity (buy)?

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Amazon EC2 storage remains problematic

nospam@example.com (Guido Stevens) — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 12:01:00 +0100

Amazon CTO Werner Vogel's recent announcement of new high-availability features in EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud) drew some attention. And indeed, being finally able to manage IP addresses for EC2 services removes one of the biggest drawbacks EC2 had until now.

Amazon reseller Rightscale even drew some nice diagrams explaining how the new EC2 features make renting a fault-tolerant hosting environment a breeze.

Some pretty interesting details got omitted somehow, though.

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thundercloud computing

nospam@example.com (Guido Stevens) — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 20:57:00 +0100

Cloud computing is a big meme to wrap your head around. A good place to start is this video (go to tab "The Coming Cloud"), featuring amongst others Nic Carr, who wrote the book.

The free software community should be mightily worried about these developments.

A world in which most software runs in one of two megaclouds controlled by the likes of Google and Microsoft is the ultimate dystopia from a software freedom point of view.
Currently available open source cloud computing software is mainly funded by Yahoo!. A Microsoft takeover of Yahoo! can hardly be beneficial.
The web 2.0 / cloud computing / software as a service paradigm disrupts the social contract constructed by the GPL around software distribution - because it disrupts software distribution per se.

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