Thinking Out Cloud

Rackspace Open Sources Its Cloud Platform: OpenStack

Today Rackspace announced it is open sourcing its cloud platform and releasing it as a project called OpenStack together with others. The code should be available for download (if not now then in a few hours) on http://OpenStack.org. From the official press release:

OpenStack will include several cloud infrastructure components, the first being OpenStack Object Storage, a fully distributed object store based on Rackspace Cloud Files, available today at OpenStack.org. The second component, OpenStack Compute, will be a massively scalable compute-provisioning engine based on the NASA Nebula compute project and Rackspace Cloud Servers technology, available later in 2010. Any organization will be able to turn physical hardware into massively scalable and extensible cloud environments using the same code currently in production serving tens of thousands of customers and large government projects.

In addition to NASA's contribution of Nebula, a number of other companies have lined up behind the project. AMD, Citrix, Dell, CloudKick, Intel, Limelight, Puppet Labs, RightScale and Zenoss all participated in an OpenStack design summit hosted by Rackspace last week in Austin.

Back in February I wrote a blog post titled Rackspace: The Avis of Cloud Computing? in which I analyzed how Rackspace is competing with Amazon in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service space. I ended the post with the following paragraph:

Finally, one more factor will play an important role in the success of each of the cloud providers, and that is the ecosystem that evolves around their products. That means management, automation and monitoring tools (e.g., RightScale, CloudKick, enStratus), Machine Image support (such as the AMIs from Red Hat/Jboss on EC2) and other ancillary products and services that form a "whole product". Amazon has the lead here as of now, but Rackspace seems to be working hard to catch up.

And indeed today's announcement appears to be the culmination of a lot of that hard work. A smart move by Rackspace that encourages the ecosystem even further.

It also looks like we are entering the "Stack Wars", with the two leading IaaS cloud stacks being Amazon's (with Eucalyptus as the private cloud version of the Amazon stack) and now OpenStack. It will be interesting to see how VMWare, Microsoft and Google all respond to this move.

This will clearly have an impact on the cloud platform startups who were going for an open source strategy, namely Enomaly and Cloud.com. Rumor has it that the latter are already planning to support OpenStack and base their product on it. [Update: In the comments below, Peder Ulander from Cloud.com confirms their participation in CloudStack].

Also of interest is how this will affect proposed standards, such as OCCI.

Oh, SaaS, Is There Anything You Can't Do?

In APIs and the Growing Influence of Developers I wrote about three general eras in software business models: High-Touch, Open and Cloud.

In the so-called "open era" we saw many startups disrupt an existing market by simply taking advantage of the open model -- and specifically open source -- with either the (more common) "open core" approach or the "open crust" approach.

So the idea was (and to some extent, it still is) that you pick any established software product category and you come out with a similar product that freely provides the source code and almost always makes available a version of the product for free download.

Now, we are in the midst of the same trend but with cloud computing. Just pick any IT product category and provide it as a service in the cloud. As expected, when the trend started there were many skeptics who consistently said that for THIS product category, cloud computing won't work (whether software-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service or infrastructure-as-a-service, as the case may be).

So 10 years ago when Salesforce.com just started with their SaaS CRM app, people said that enterprises would never put their most sensitive lead, opportunity and sales information "on some web site." I remember reading for the first time the news that Salesforce.com landed Merrill Lynch as a customer. Sure it was a tiny deal made by some small division within the company, but I knew it was all over.

A similar thing happened not too long ago with Zoho landing a deal with GE, and since then both Zoho and Google Apps have won many deals with large enterprises replacing Microsoft Office with their SaaS offerings.

In the case of productivity apps, such as Office, Google Apps and Zoho, the naysayers said that the SaaS offerings are severely lacking in features. They neglected, however, to realize a few things:

• With a SaaS product, rolling out features is an incremental low-effort process, so that new features will be rapidly added
• For the vast majority of users, and the majority of uses, a relatively rudimentary set of features are good enough
• The SaaS offerings had a new set of features that desktop-installed applications would find it extremely difficult to replicate, for example, collaboration and sharing, automatic backups in the cloud, accessibility from any computer, etc.

I am increasingly convinced that there isn't any category of software for which the cloud is not a good delivery method. Here's another example:

I recently spoke to Tom Greenhaw, founder of Cashier Live. Cashier Live provides a software- as-a-service offering for point-of-sale (PoS): in other words, cash registers. What I found interesting about Cashier Live is that it requires non-commodity hardware and the software needs to interact with the hardware: open the cash register, print receipts, accept credit card and bar code scans, etc. Something that you wouldn't think is an optimal fit for SaaS.

But Cashier Live is doing well with hundreds of customers. They have overcome the technical challenge of hardware integration (for now using proprietary browser capabilities of Internet Explorer, but they are working on solutions for other browsers). And they provide compelling benefits, particularly for small and medium retailers who do not have an in-house IT staff and find it difficult to make big upfront expenditures on software licenses.

Do you have an example of another SaaS offering that is seemingly a bad fit for its category but makes sense to you? Please share in the comments. 

QCon San Francisco 2010 Cloud Track

This year I will be hosting the QCon San Francisco Cloud Track. If you haven't attended QCon before, it's a high quality conference that takes place twice a year in London and San Francisco. The attendants are usually senior software development and IT executives, software architects and senior developers from enterprises and startups. The conferences are organized by the fine folks at InfoQ.

The theme of the cloud track this year will be Real-Life Cloud Architectures, with the focus being on production apps by larger organizations in the cloud. There will be five sessions all of which will take place on Friday, November 5, 2010.

The first presentation will be given by yours truly on selecting the right cloud provider (more details to come). Another presentation will be given by Randy Bias (@randybias) of Cloudscaling on the topic of building a private cloud. I don't want to give it away but Randy has some controversial views on the subject (and a lot of experience), so it's sure to be an interesting session.

Informal Call for Speakers

Although I have a few candidates for the other sessions, I'm still looking for speakers and panelists. In particular, I am looking for two things: a company that has migrated an existing production application to a public cloud and a company that has implemented a hybrid cloud application (meaning it runs both on-premise and in the cloud). 

If you would like to suggest yourself or someone else, please send me an email (if you have my address), leave a comment below, or contact me through Twitter or LinkedIN.

Hope to see you there!