Controversy over the "open cloud"

Last week's debut of the Open Cloud Manifesto was not without controversy, as Microsoft claimed that an open process was not used to create the document, and that it was asked to sign it without the opportunity to provide feedback or revisions.

But Microsoft later met with companies such as Cisco, IBM and Intel and generally agreed on the importance of cloud computing services being open and interoperable.

Reuven Cohen, the founder and chief technologist for cloud computing start-up Enomaly, and one of the people responsible for bringing the manifesto to the public, is advocating for the creation of an industry association focused on marketing a cohesive picture of what cloud computing is.

While many vendors are still defining cloud computing in different ways, Cohen argues that "we can still compete, but we don't necessarily have to tell different stories about what the cloud is. There is an opportunity to come together and grow the market."

How the cloud is defined will be important to limit confusion in the marketplace. Every vendor is using the word "cloud" to suit their own purposes, but the Sys-Con conference last week demonstrated that a common definition is probably not that far away.

As an approach to building IT services, cloud computing harnesses several converging factors in the IT world, including the rapidly increasing horsepower of servers and virtualization technologies that combine many servers into large computing pools and divide single servers into multiple virtual machines that can be spun up and powered down at will.

Led by companies such as Amazon, vendors are building massively scalable server farms to offer compute power, storage, business software and application building platforms over the Internet, using self-service interfaces that let customers acquire resources at any time they want and get rid of them the instant they are no longer needed. Private clouds deployed by enterprises for their own users are built along the same principles, but done so completely within the firewall.

"There is a shift from infrastructure being a capital expense to a variable cost," said Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, during a speech at Sys-Con.

If you are the founder of a start-up that is building an application for Facebook, you have to prepare for the possibility of becoming immensely popular overnight, Vogels said. But you might also fail. That's why you need on-demand access to the power of 5,000 servers at any time, without having to spend the money up front. Or if you run a seasonal business, you may need huge amounts of computing power one month out of the year, but very little during the remaining 11 months.