Open Source and Cloud Computing

This isn’t just a “moral” appeal, but strategic advice. The first provider to build a reasonably open, re-usable system service in any particular area is going to get the biggest uptake. Right now, there’s a lot of focus on low level platform subsystems like storage and computation, but I continue to believe that many of the key subsystems in this evolving OS will be data subsystems, like identity, location, payment, product catalogs, music, etc. And eventually, these subsystems will need to be reasonably open and interoperable, so that a developer can build a data-intensive application without having to own all the data his application requires. This is what John Musser calls the programmable web.—Open Source and Cloud Computing

2 Comments

Denis Canuel August 13, 2008

I totally agree. All projects will have to be in the cloud eventually. Take web hosting for example. Instead of having physical web servers, you could have everything in the cloud. Of course you still need web servers in the end (to support the cloud) but you could have a totally virtual company in the end.

It may sound weird to think about “servers hosting servers” but I believe the days of the mom and pop data centers are counted.

Computing power will one day be calculated in units, not in machines (just like electricity). It’s actually already the case with S3.

Patrick August 13, 2008

As long, as he says, as the cloud includes open exchange of data and you are never locked in to the platform where you are deploying.

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