Private Clouds? Hosted vs Private, what comes next?
So, I saw the article about Cisco entering the server, or private cloud market. The big enterprise vendors Microsoft with Azure, Sun with Q-layer, have started to want to get in on the cloud hosting companies and several announcements recently have been interesting. However, in my opinion the market leader is still Amazon Web Services, EC2, S3, etc. I recently moved my Demisauce server to EC2 and really enjoyed setting it up.
As more and more capability moves to hosted services, open-source gains with linux etc but what else? Xen was gaining especially with Amazon EC2, however Ubuntu seems to be moving away from xen towards KVM, as does Redhat (Wow, kvm just needs to get faster though, I run it on my quad core AMD machine at home and it is much, much slower than my VMWare fusion images on my mac). Redhat is building everything it needs for a CloudOS, with virtual machine management (Ovirt), hypervisor (KVM), security & directory (FreeIPA), and an API for virtual machine configuration (libvirt).
Once again, I can’t help but feel that the value proposition of Open-source is being missed by some of the big-co’s. Open-source is so valuable because capability and inventions by one can be utilized by other’s. This really isn’t as possible (ok, you can license technology from each, but that doesn’t happen much) among the proprietary vendors. So, in the end run I think that the open source stack is going to exceed what the vendor’s provide.
